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Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar

In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought.

These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract change expressions in Japanese; mood in Spanish; deictic expressions; copular sentences in Japanese; conditional constructions; and reference in American Sign Language.

The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists.

The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.


364 pages | 69 line drawings, 1 table | 6 x 9 | © 1996

Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series

Cognitive Science: Language

Language and Linguistics: Philosophy of Language

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1: Cognitive Links and Domains: Basic Aspects of Mental Space Theory
Eve Sweetser, Gilles Fauconnier.
2: Mental Spaces, Constructional Meaning, and Pragmatic Ambiguity
Claudia Brugman
3: Analogical Counterfactuals
Gilles Fauconnier
4: Sorry, Iā€™m Not Myself Today: The Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the
Self
George Lakoff
5: Subjective-Change Expressions in Japanese and Their Cognitive and
Linguistic Bases
Yo Matsumoto
6: Space Accessibility and Mood in Spanish
Errapel Mejias-Bikandi
7: Cross-World Continuity and the Polysemy of Adverbial Still
Laura A. Michaelis
8: Alternate Grounds in the Interpretation of Deictic Expressions
Jo Rubba
9: Roles and Identificational Copular Sentences
Shigeru Sakahara
10: Perspective and the Representation of Speech and Thought in Narrative
Discourse
Jose Sanders, Gisela Redeker.
11: Mental Spaces and the Grammar of Conditional Constructions
Eve Sweetser
12: Conceptual Locations for Reference in American Sign Language
Karen van Hoek
Index

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