Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting and conceptual blending. By addressing linguistic phenomena often ignored in traditional meaning research, Coulson explains how processes of cross-domain mapping, frame-shifting, and conceptual blending enhance the explanatory adequacy of traditional frame-based systems for natural language processing. The focus is on how the constructive processes speakers use to assemble, link, and adapt simple cognitive models underlie a broad range of productive language behavior.

Analogy—recalling familiar past situations to deal with novel ones—is a mental tool that everyone uses. Analogy can provide invaluable creative insights, but it can also lead to dangerous errors. In Mental Leaps two leading cognitive scientists show how analogy works and how it can be used most effectively. Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard provide a unified, comprehensive account of the diverse operations and applications of analogy, including problem solving, decision making, explanation, and communication. Holyoak and Thagard present their own theory of analogy, considering its implications for cognitive science in general, and survey examples from many other domains. These include animal cognition, developmental and social psychology, political science, philosophy, history of science, anthropology, and literature. Understanding how we draw analogies is important for people interested in the evolution of thinking in animals and in children; for those whose focus is on either creative thinking or errors of everyday reasoning; for those concerned with how decisions are made in law, business, and politics; and for those striving to improve education. Mental Leaps covers all of this ground, emphasizing the principles that govern the use of analogy and keeping technical matters to a minimum. A Bradford Book

The third edition of this popular textbook provides an engaging and accessible introduction to semantics for students new to the field. Explores the basic concepts and methods of the field and discusses some of the most important contemporary lines of research Contains new solutions to chapter exercises in order to familiarize the student with the practice of semantic description Completely revised and updated to reflect recent theoretical developments Includes new sections on classifiers and noun classes, as well as conceptual integration

This book introduces a new thrilling field –neurocomputional poetics, the scientific ‘marriage’ between cognitive poetics, data science and neuroscience. Its goal is to uncover the secrets of verbal art reception and to explain how readers come to understand and like literary texts. The book offers state-of-the-art computational models and methods allowing to predict which crucial textual features of prose and poetry, such as syntactic and semantic complexity or emotion potential, interact with reader features, such as empathy or openness to experience, in shaping a literary reading act with its neuronal, experiential and behavioural correlates. It contains hands-on practical examples on how to do computational text analyses of books and poems that can answer questions like: Which is Jane Austen’s most beautiful book? Which poet created the most fitting poetic metaphors? or Which author of plays of the nineteenth century was the most literary? The model and methods introduced in the book help explain what makes texts comprehensible and likeable and how they affect our body and mind. It offers game-changing insights for both fundamental and applied science that will affect standard metrics of readability and the way text processing and verbal art reception are viewed in literary studies, education, psychology or the media sciences and industry.