You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book deals with how language users express and understand literal and metaphorical spatial meaning in language and through gesture and pointing. The research draws on data from textual investigation using corpora, as well as from experiments of various kinds, such as psycholinguistic experiments and eye-tracking.
Taste is considered one of the lowest sensory modalities, and the most difficult to express in language. Recently, an increasing body of research in perception language and in Food Studies has been sparkling new interest and new perspectives on the importance of this sense. Merging anthropology, evolutionary physiology and philosophy, this book investigates the language of Taste in English, and its relationship with our embodied minds. In the first part of the book, the author explores the semantic dimensions of Taste terms with a usage-based approach. With the application of experimental protocols, Bagli enquires their possible organization in a radial network and calculates the Salience in...
Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and ...
How is it that humans are able to organize seemingly random sounds into the captivating sonic structures we call music? In this volume, Lawrence M. Zbikowski argues that humans' unique ability to correlate sounds with dynamic processes provides the basis for the construction of meaningful musical utterances - that is, a foundation for musical grammar. Building on a framework for grammar developed by cognitive linguists over the past three decades and the pathbreaking research set out in his earlier book, Conceptualizing Music (OUP 2002), Zbikowski explains how the ability to draw analogies between widely differing domains allowing humans to connect sequences of musical sounds with emotion pr...
In Probability Designs, Karin Kukkonen presents the predictive processing model of cognition as a means of exploring narrative structure and reader experience. Utilizing the literary canon of various cultures, Kukkonen combines theory and cognitive science to analyze how reader expectation and prediction shape literature, and how literature accomplishes cognitive feats that determine the human capacity for free, exploratory thought.
Information Design provides citizens, business and government with a means of presenting and interacting with complex information. It embraces applications from wayfinding and map reading to forms design; from website and screen layout to instruction. Done well it can communicate across languages and cultures, convey complicated instructions, even change behaviours. Information Design offers an authoritative guide to this important multidisciplinary subject. The book weaves design theory and methods with case studies of professional practice from leading information designers across the world. The heavily illustrated text is rigorous yet readable and offers a single, must-have, reference to anyone interested in information design or any of its related disciplines such as interaction design and information architecture, information graphics, document design, universal design, service design, map-making and wayfinding.
The volume addresses the role of salience in discourse and provides broad coverage of various perspectives on and functions of discourse salience. The range of multidisciplinary approaches adopted in the volume differ with regard to the underlying theoretical proposals and foci of research. The topics range from (i) entity-based salience to (ii) discourse-structural salience of utterances to (iii) extra-linguistic factors of salience in discourse. Accordingly, the volume is organized into three sections. Part I focuses on discourse referents and the choice of referring expressions. The contributions cover issues such as salience and demonstrativity in Russian, discourse salience and grammati...
Disability is a thorny and muddled concept - especially in the field of disability studies - and social accounts contest with more traditional biologically based approaches in highly politicized debates. Sustained theoretical scrutiny has sometimes been lost amongst the controversy and philosophical issues have often been overlooked in favour of the sociological. Arguing about Disability fills that gap by offering analysis and debate concerning the moral nature of institutions, policy and practice, and their significance for disabled people and society. This pioneering collection is divided into three sections covering definitions and theories of disability; disabled people in society and ap...
The Freedom of Words is for anyone interested in understanding the role of body and language in cognition and how humans developed the sophisticated ability to use abstract concepts like 'freedom' and 'thinking'. This volume adopts a transdisciplinary perspective, including philosophy, semiotics, psychology, and neuroscience, to show how language, as a tool, shapes our minds and influences our interaction with the physical and social environment. It develops a theory showing how abstract concepts in their different varieties enhance cognition and profoundly influence our social and affective life. It addresses how children learn such abstract concepts, details how they vary across languages and cultures, and outlines the link between abstractness and the capability to detect inner bodily signals. Overall, the book shows how words – abstract words in particular, because of their indeterminate and open character – grant us freedom.
Narratology has been flourishing in recent years thanks to investigations into a broad spectrum of narratives, at the same time diversifying its theoretical and disciplinary scope as it has sought to specify the status of narrative within both society and scientific research. The diverse endeavors engendered by this situation have brought narrative to the forefront of the social and human sciences and have generated new synergies in the research environment. Emerging Vectors of Narratology brings together 27 state-of-the-art contributions by an international panel of authors that provide insight into the wealth of new developments in the field. The book consists of two sections. "Contexts" i...