Mappings in Thought and Language

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This 1997 book examines a central component of meaning construction: the mappings that link mental spaces. A deep result of the research is that the same principles operate at the highest leve...

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This 1997 book examines a central component of meaning construction: the mappings that link mental spaces. A deep result of the research is that the same principles operate at the highest levels of scientific, artistic, and literary thought, and at the lower levels of elementary understanding and sentence meaning. Some key cognitive operations are analogical mappings, conceptual integration and blending, discourse management, induction and recursion. The analyses are based on a rich array of attested data in ordinary language, humor, action and design, science, and narratives. Phenomena that receive attention include counterfactuals; time, tense, and mood; opacity; metaphor; fictive motion; grammatical constructions; quantification over cognitive domains.

本书作者Gilles Fauconnier是美国著名认知语言学家，现任加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校认知科学系教授。其主要著作除本书外，还有《思维和语言中的映现》(Mappings in Thought and Language，1997，Cambridge University Press)，《我们思维的方式：概念整合与思维的隐含复杂性》(与Mark TUrner合著)(The Way We Think：Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities，2002，Basic Books)等。