The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse. In line with the well-known volume Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Holland and Quinn (1987), the volume shows that Cognitive Linguistics has further explored the idea that we think about social reality in terms of models - 'cognitive/cultural models' or 'folk theories'. As in cultural models, the present volume demonstrates that the technical apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics can be used to analyze the various ways our conception of social reality is shaped by underlying cognitive and/or cultural models or patterns of thought, and also looks into how this is done. The new inroad the volume wants to pursue is the deliberate and explicit orientation towards a cognitive sociolinguistics, or more generally, a cognitive semiotics.

A multidisciplinary collaboration exploring the role of cultural knowledge in everyday language and understanding.

Metonymy in Language and Thought gives a state-of-the-art account of metonymic research. The contributions have different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology and literary studies. However, they share the assumption that metonymy is a cognitive phenomenon, a “figure of thought,” underlying much of our ordinary conceptualization that may be even more fundamental than metaphor. The use of metonymy in language is a reflection of this conceptual status. The framework within which metonymy is understood in this volume is that of scenes, frames, scenarios, domains or idealized cognitive models. The chapters are revised papers given at the Metonymy Workshop held in Hamburg, 1996.

In From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between. Although the cognitive sciences are revealing much about how our brains produce language and thought, we do not yet know exactly how words are understood or have any methodology for finding out. Feldman develops his theory in computer simulations—formal models that suggest ways that language and thought may be realized in the brain. Combining key findings and theories from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology, Feldman synthesizes a theory by exhibiting programs that demonstrate the required behavior while remaining consistent with the findings from all disciplines. After presenting the essential results on language, learning, neural computation, the biology of neurons and neural circuits, and the mind/brain, Feldman introduces specific demonstrations and formal models of such topics as how children learn their first words, words for abstract and metaphorical concepts, understanding stories, and grammar (including "hot-button" issues surrounding the innateness of human grammar). With this accessible, comprehensive book Feldman offers readers who want to understand how our brains create thought and language a theory of language that is intuitively plausible and also consistent with existing scientific data at all levels.

This volume deals with core issues in figurative language and figurative thought. It also explores areas of convergence between idealised cognitive models and language across fourteen European and non-European languages (Croatian, English, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Old Saxon, Sicilian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish). The collection foregrounds the relationship that holds between literalness and figurativeness in meaning construction, it emphasises the role of conceptual metonymy and metaphor as the main cognitive tools at work in inferential activity and as generators of discourse ties, and it also depicts the import of cognitive models in the production and interpretation of multimodal communication. In addition, a number of more specific topics are addressed from different perspectives, such as language variation and cultural models, the argumentative role of metaphor in discourse and the role of empirical work in cognitive linguistics.

This open access book introduces a general framework that allows natural language researchers to enhance existing competence theories with fully specified performance and processing components. Gradually developing increasingly complex and cognitively realistic competence-performance models, it provides running code for these models and shows how to fit them to real-time experimental data. This computational cognitive modeling approach opens up exciting new directions for research in formal semantics, and linguistics more generally, and offers new ways of (re)connecting semantics and the broader field of cognitive science. The approach of this book is novel in more ways than one. Assuming the mental architecture and procedural modalities of Anderson's ACT-R framework, it presents fine-grained computational models of human language processing tasks which make detailed quantitative predictions that can be checked against the results of self-paced reading and other psycho-linguistic experiments. All models are presented as computer programs that readers can run on their own computer and on inputs of their choice, thereby learning to design, program and run their own models. But even for readers who won't do all that, the book will show how such detailed, quantitatively predicting modeling of linguistic processes is possible. A methodological breakthrough and a must for anyone concerned about the future of linguistics! (Hans Kamp) This book constitutes a major step forward in linguistics and psycholinguistics. It constitutes a unique synthesis of several different research traditions: computational models of psycholinguistic processes, and formal models of semantics and discourse processing. The work also introduces a sophisticated python-based software environment for modeling linguistic processes. This book has the potential to revolutionize not only formal models of linguistics, but also models of language processing more generally. (Shravan Vasishth) .

In a compelling defense of the speculative approach to the philosophy of mind, Jerry Fodor argues that, while our best current theories of cognitive psychology view many higher processes as computational, computation itself presupposes an internal medium of representation. Fodor's prime concerns are to buttress the notion of internal representation from a philosophical viewpoint, and to determine those characteristics of this conceptual construct using the empirical data available from linguistics and cognitive psychology.