Meaning In Communication Cognition And Reality

This book presents a general and formal theory of meaning, signs, and language. The theory is presented in a clear and consistent way offering novel and provocative insights into the fundamental structures and processes of communication, cognition, and reality. Key topics include distinctions and categories, the self-contradictory dualism of word vs. object, linguistic meaning monism, relations and processes in the semiotic triangle, conceptual prototypicality and fuzziness, semantic fields and frames, meaning medium vs. forms, as well as activation and co-activation of meanings. In order to illustrate and apply the theory, everyday examples, in particular power and law, are discussed throughout the book. Methodological questions of data collection and analysis are also addressed as they are relevant to the empirical application and verification of the theory. The book combines approaches from systems theory, non-dualism, prototype theory, semantic field theory, speech act theory, and structuralism. Due to its broad and interdisciplinary focus, this book will not only appeal to semioticians, philosophers, and sociologists, but also to linguists, cultural anthropologists, and cognitive scientists.

Historically, the social aspects of language use have been considered the domain of social psychology, while the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms have been the purview of cognitive psychology. Recently, it has become increasingly clear that these two dimensions are highly interrelated: cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact with social psychological factors, such as beliefs about one's interlocutors and politeness norms, and with the dynamics of the conversation itself, to produce shared meaning. This realization has led to an exciting body of research integrating the social and cognitive dimensions which has greatly increased our understanding of human language use. Each chapter in this volume demonstrates how the theoretical approaches and research methods of social and cognitive psychology can be successfully interwoven to provide insight into one or more fundamental questions about the process of interpersonal communication. The topics under investigation include the nature and role of speaker intentions in the communicative process, the production and comprehension of indirect speech and figurative language, perspective-taking and conversational collaboration, and the relationships between language, cognition, culture, and social interaction. The book will be of interest to all those who study interpersonal language use: social and cognitive psychologists, theoretical and applied linguists, and communication researchers.

The principal processes involved in language production and communication are explored in depth, and their effects on all main social psychological phenomena revealed.

This book provides a good overview of philosophical and cognitive approaches to language use and meaning. A synthesis of such approaches leads to a dynamic concept of pragmatic meaning which is on the one hand grounded in cognition and motivated by linguistic and cultural convention and, on the other, creates a framework for studying the interactive and social dimensions of the development of meaning in linguistic communication. Through an experientialist approach based on connectionist models, the author shows that by internalizing pragmatic meaning people become social agents who reproduce, challenge or change their social parameters during interaction.Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition is suitable as a course book in Pragmatics and Semantics and of interest to those concerned with cognitive models and dynamic and social aspects of linguistic communication.

Sharing a commitment to the theory of communication to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action , Grant here issues a range of challenges to it. He critiques theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in today's world.

Givon's new book re-casts pragmatics, and most conspicuously the pragmatics of sociality and communication, in neuro-cognitive, bio-adaptive, evolutionary terms. The fact that context, the core notion of pragmatics, is a framing operation undertaken on the fly through judgements of relevance, has been well known since Aristotle, Kant and Peirce. But the context that is relevant to the pragmatics of sociality and communication is a highly specific mental operation — the mental modeling of the interlocutor's current, rapidly shifting belief-and-intention states. The construed context of social interaction and communication is thus a mental representation of other minds. Following a condensed intellectual history of pragmatics, the book investigates the adaptive pragmatics of lexical-semantic categories — the 1st-order framing of “reality", what cognitive psychologists call “semantic memory”. Utilizing the network model, the book then takes a fresh look at the adaptive underpinnings of metaphoric meaning. The core chapters of the book outline the re-interpretation of “communicative context” as the systematic, on-line construction of mental models of the interlocutor’s current, rapidly-shifting states of belief and intention. This grand theme is elaborated through examples from the grammar of referential coherence, verbal modalities and clause-chaining. In its final chapters, the book pushes pragmatics beyond its traditional bounds, surveying its interdisciplinary implications for philosophy of science, theory of personality, personality disorders and the calculus of social interaction.

Communication is the core activity for an educator, conveying and sharing information from one person to another, from one organization to another. This work includes contributions which encompass a series of topics in communication psychology.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of how translation and cognition relate to each other, discussing the most important issues in the fledgling sub-discipline of Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS), from foundational to applied aspects. With a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, the handbook surveys concepts and methods in neighbouring disciplines that are concerned with cognition and how they relate to translational activity from a cognitive perspective. Looking at different types of cognitive processes, this volume also ventures into emergent areas such as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive ergonomics and human–computer interaction. With an editors’ introduction and 30 chapters authored by leading scholars in the field of Cognitive Translation Studies, this handbook is the essential reference and resource for students and researchers of translation and cognition and will also be of interest to those working in bilingualism, second-language acquisition and related areas.