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\"Think about the game charades. Its rules are simple: no talking, of course, and little else. Each time we play with a new group, we have to figure each other out, with our different styles, backgrounds, and senses of the world, as we struggle to connect how we would act out something (say, Christopher Columbus crossing the Atlantic) with how other people might understand it. But as we play, a lingo can develop-with time, an upheld hand, bobbing along, might not just come to represent the ship on the Santa Maria, but a vast range of possibilities, including both conceptual ones such as exploration or trade, actions like sailing, or even a place like India or Santo Domingo. Almost from nothing, the players can create something like a language. Such nearly rule-less games are a hallmark of the human species: testament not just to our intelligence, but our flexibility of mind as well as our desires to cooperate, to understand, and to be understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Nick Chater and Morten Christiansen show games like charades reveal something more: where language comes from and how it works. Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing traits, and one of its most studied, but as Chater and Christiansen, it has been our most poorly understood. Several generations of scientists sought to understand how the rules of language could be hardwired in the brain. It was a colossal mistake. Chater and Christiansen show that language is hardly about rules at all, let alone those welded into our brain by evolution, but rather about near-total freedom, where the only real constraints are our imaginations and our desire to be understood. And with that as the point of departure, they are able to find compelling solutions to old riddles and new puzzles, including why chimpanzees don't understand pointing fingers; whether having two words for \"blue\" changes what we see; why Danish is so much harder to learn than Norwegian; how words change meanings; and whether computers will ever truly understand a human. The Language Game will bewitch readers of classic books on mind and language, such as Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach and John McWhorter's The Power of Babel, and find a welcome spot on the shelf of readers of Joseph Henrich's Weirdest People in the World and Frans de Waal's Mama's Last Hug. And like the game of charades, it will engage, amuse, and dazzle readers for years to come\"-- Provided by publisher.

Cognitive Linguistics, the branch of linguistics that tries to \"make one's account of human language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain,\" has become one of the most flourishing fields of contemporary linguistics.The chapters address many classic topics of Cognitive Linguistics.

This book presents a multidisciplinary theoretical model of cultural conceptualisations and language. Viewing language as firmly grounded in cultural cognition, the model draws on analytical tools and theoretical advancements in several disciplines, including cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, anthropological linguistics, distributed cognition, complexity science, and cognitive psychology. The result is a framework that has significant implications for those disciplines as well as for applied linguistics. Applications of the model to intercultural communication, cross-cultural pragmatics, English as an International Language/World Englishes, and political discourse analysis are explored in detail.

Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives is an up-to-date survey of recent research in Cognitive Linguistics and its applications by prominent researchers. The volume brings together generally accessible syntheses and special studies of Cognitive Linguistics strands in a sizable format and is thus an asset not only to the Cognitive Linguistics community, but also to neighbouring disciplines and linguists in general. The volume covers a wide range of fields and combines wide accessibility with a highly specific information value. Key features: * An excellent source for the study of Applied Cognitive Linguistics, one of the most popular and fastest growing areas in Linguistics. * Authoritative and detailed survey articles by leading scholars in the field. * Accessible to a general audience, yet also characterized by a highly specific information value.

Figurativity has attracted scholars' attention for thousands of years and yet there are still open questions concerning its nature. This volume endorses a view of figurativity as ubiquitous in human reasoning and language, and as a key example of how a human organism and its perceived or imagined environment co-function as a system.

There is ample evidence that language users, including second-language (L2) users, can predict upcoming information during listening and reading. Yet it is still unclear when, how, and why language users engage in prediction, and what the relation is between prediction and learning. This volume presents a collection of current research, insights, and directions regarding the role of prediction in L2 processing and learning. The contributions in this volume specifically address how different (L1-based) theoretical models of prediction apply to or may be expanded to account for L2 processing, report new insights on factors (linguistic, cognitive, social) that modulate L2 users' engagement in prediction, and discuss the functions that prediction may or may not serve in L2 processing and learning. Taken together, this volume illustrates various fruitful approaches to investigating and accounting for differences in predictive processing within and across individuals, as well as across populations.

This book explores the importance of Cognitive Linguistics for specialized language within the context of Frame-based Terminology (FBT). FBT uses aspects of Frame Semantics, coupled with premises from Cognitive Linguistics to structure specialized domains and create non-language-specific knowledge representations. Corpus analysis provides information regarding the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of specialized knowledge units. Also studied is the role of metaphor and metonymy in specialized texts. The first section explains the purpose and structure of the book. The second section gives an overview of basic concepts, theories, and applications in Terminology and Cognitive Linguistics. The third section explains the Frame-based Terminology approach. The fourth section explores the role of contextual information in specialized knowledge representation as reflected in linguistic contexts and graphical information. The final section highlights the conclusions that can be derived from this study.

This volume reveals new insights on the faculty of language. By proposing a new approach in the analysis and description of Italian Sign Language (LIS), that can be extended also to other sign languages.

This volume brings together twelve usage-based studies conducted by leading researchers in language and cognition that explore core issues of figurativeness from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective.