Ten Lectures On Applied Cognitive Linguistics

A series of 10 lectures on various aspects of Cognitive Linguistics as these relate to matters of language teaching and learning.

Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics presents ten lectures, in both audio and transcribed text, given by George Lakoff in Beijing in April 2004. Lakoff gives an account of the background of cognitive linguistics, and basic mechanisms of thought, grammar, neural theory of language, metaphor, implications for Philosophy, and political linguistics. He does so in a manner that is accessible for anyone, including undergraduate level students and a general audience. With the massive experience of being a linguist for over 50 years, and being one of the founding fathers of the field, George Lakoff is one of the best possible experts to introduce Cognitive Linguistics to anyone. The lectures for this book were given at The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics in April 2004.

In Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics and the Unification of Spoken and Signed Languages Sherman Wilcox suggests that rather than abstracting away from the material substance of language, linguists can discover the deep connections between signed and spoken languages by taking an embodied view.

Melissa Bowerman’s lectures present a lucid detailed account of her research on how children build up a semantics for domains such as space in their first language, and the roles played by adult speech, typology, and cross-linguistic variation.

In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents a uniquely cultural, developmental and evolutionary approach to cognitive linguistics. Topics range from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism.

Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics as an Empirical Science details the relationship between form and meaning in language, especially at the systematic level of morphology as evidenced in Slavic languages.

This volume presents a synthesis of research in cognitive linguistics and the psychology of language. It highlights the tension between “linguists’ grammars”, which are influenced by considerations of economy and elegance, and “speakers’ grammars”, which are messy and less than fully general.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics combines the interest in meaning of Cognitive Linguistics with the interest in social variation of sociolinguistics, converging on two domains of enquiry: variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation. These Ten Lectures, a transcribed version of talks given by professor Geeraerts in 2009 at Beihang University in Beijing, introduce and illustrate both dimensions. The ‘variation of meaning’ perspective involves looking at types of semantic and categorial variation, at the role of social and cultural factors in semantic variation and change, and at the interplay of stereotypes, prototypes and norms. The ‘meaning of variation’ perspective involves looking at the way in which categorization processes of the type studied by Cognitive Linguistics shape how scholars and laymen think about language variation.