Language And Social Minds

Proposes a new empirical model to analyse how humans can express social cognition at different levels of complexity.

In a collection of 16 papers, eminent scholars from several disciplines present diverse and yet cohering perspectives on the expression of social knowledge, its acquisition and management. Hence, the volume is an attempt to view the social functions of language in a novel, systematic way. Such an approach has been missing due to the complexity of the matter and the emphasis on purely cognitive properties of language. The volume starts with a presentation of overarching issues of the social nature of humans and their language, providing strong evidence for the social fundaments of human nature and their reflection in language and culture. The second section demonstrates how social functions can be displayed in discourse by using language play and humor, irony and attributions as well as references to social schemas. The chapters in the third part examine a wide range of particular linguistic elements carrying social-cognitive functions. An important finding is that social-cognitive functions have to be inferred on the basis of social knowledge, frequently with the help of non-verbal cues, since languages offer only few direct expressions for them. In other words, linguistic devices used to express social content tend to be multifunctional. Interestingly, this multifunctionality does not prevent their rapid recognition. The volume presents valuable information to linguists by widening the cognitive-linguistic framework and by contributing to a better understanding of the role of pragmatics. It is also beneficial to social and cognitive psychologists by offering a broader view on the encoding and decoding of social aspects. Finally, it offers a number of fruitful ideas to students of cultural and communication studies.

Proposes a new empirical model to analyse how humans can express social cognition at different levels of complexity.

Social Minds in the Novel is the highly readable sequel to Alan Palmer's award-winning and much-acclaimed Fictional Minds. Here he argues that because of its undue emphasis on the inner, introspective, private, solitary, and individual mind, literary theory tells only part of the story of how characters in novels think. In addition to this internalist view, Palmer persuasively advocates an externalist perspective on the outer, active, public, social, and embodied mind. His analysis reveals, for example, that a good deal of fictional thought is intermental-- joint, group, shared, or collective. Social Minds in the Novel Social minds are not of marginal interest; they are central to our understanding of fictional storyworlds. The purpose of this groundbreaking and important book is to put the complex and fascinating relationship between social and individual minds at the heart of narrative theory. The book will be of interest to scholars in narrative theory, cognitive poetics or stylistics, cognitive approaches to literature, philosophy of mind, social psychology, and the nineteenth-century novel. focuses primarily on the epistemological and ethical debate in the nineteenth-century novel about the extent of our knowledge of the workings of other minds and the purposes to which this knowledge should be put. Palmer's illuminating approach is pursued through skillful and provocative readings of Bleak House, Middlemarch, and Persuasion, and, in addition, Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.

Stepping beyond cognitive science's new theory of connectionism, Gee formulates a dynamic social theory of mind and meaning. With penetrating analyses, he illustrates how such psychological entities as memories, beliefs, values, and meanings are not formed in isolation but in a social or cultural context that is inherently ideological or political. As he moves toward his conclusion showing what socio-culturally situated linguistics would look like and points to some of the implications for human development, education, and society inherent in this view of linguistics, Gee persuasively demonstrates how people often construct self-deceptive stories that advantage themselves or their group. In the first half of the book, Gee lays the groundwork for the overall theory of language, mind, and society that is developed in the two concluding chapters. He develops a concept of meaning as being rooted in cultural models, introduces a connectionist view of the mind/brain, and argues that memory is a social phenomenon. Then Gee sketches together a theory of mind and society and the nature of socio-cultural-based psychology. He explicitly displays how language fits within social practices and exemplifies claims about the political and ideological nature of social practices. This is a thought-provoking contribution for courses dealing with discourse, narrative, social linguistics, education, social theory, cognitive science, social cognition, and linguistics in anthropology.

A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition—often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms—is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in domain-general learning theory as it relates to language acquisition, Kapatsinski argues that the way minds change as a result of experience can help explain how languages change over time and can predict the likely directions of language change—which in turn predicts what kinds of structures we find in the languages of the world. What we know about how we learn (the core question of learning theory) can help us understand why languages are the way they are (the core question of theoretical linguistics). Taking a dynamic, usage-based perspective, Kapatsinski focuses on diachronic universals, recurrent pathways of language change, rather than synchronic universals, properties that all languages share. Topics include associative approaches to learning and the neural implementation of the proposed mechanisms; selective attention; units of language; a comparison of associative and Bayesian approaches to learning; representation in the mind of visual and auditory experience; the production of new words and new forms of words; and automatization of repeated action sequences. This approach brings us closer to understanding why languages are the way they are, Kapatsinski contends, than approaches premised on innate knowledge of language universals and the language acquisition device.

Introducing a spelling test to a student by saying, 'Let' s see how many words you know,' is different from saying, 'Let's see how many words you know already.' It is only one word, but the already suggests that any words the child knows are ahead of expectation and, most important, that there is nothing permanent about what is known and not known. Peter Johnston Grounded in research, Opening Minds: Using Language to Change Livesshows how words can shape students' learning, their sense of self, and their social, emotional and moral development. Make no mistake: words have the power to open minds – or close them. Following up his groundbreaking book, Choice Words, author Peter Johnston continues to demonstrate how the things teachers say (and don't say) have surprising consequences for the literate lives of students. In this new book, Johnston shows how the words teachers choose can affect the worlds students inhabit in the classroom. He explains how to engage children with more productive talk and how to create classrooms that support students' intellectual development, as well as their development as human beings.

Why language ability remains resilient and how it shapes our lives. We acquire our native language, seemingly without effort, in infancy and early childhood. Language is our constant companion throughout our lifetime, even as we age. Indeed, compared with other aspects of cognition, language seems to be fairly resilient through the process of aging. In Changing Minds, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts examine how aging affects language—and how language affects aging. Kreuz and Roberts report that what appear to be changes in an older person's language ability are actually produced by declines in such other cognitive processes as memory and perception. Some language abilities, including vocabulary size and writing ability, may even improve with age. And certain language activities—including reading fiction and engaging in conversation—may even help us live fuller and healthier lives. Kreuz and Roberts explain the cognitive processes underlying our language ability, exploring in particular how changes in these processes lead to changes in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They consider, among other things, the inability to produce a word that's on the tip of your tongue—and suggest that the increasing incidence of this with age may be the result of a surfeit of world knowledge. For example, older people can be better storytellers, and (something to remember at a family reunion) their perceived tendency toward off-topic verbosity may actually reflect communicative goals.