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Meaning, Mind and Communication

Explorations in Cognitive Semiotics

by Jordan Zlatev (Volume editor) Göran Sonesson (Volume editor) Piotr Konderak (Volume editor)
©2016 Edited Collection 482 Pages

Summary

This volume constitutes the first anthology of texts in cognitive semiotics – the new transdisciplinary study of meaning, mind and communication that combines concepts and methods from semiotics, cognitive science and linguistics – from a multitude of established and younger scholars. The chapters deal with the interaction between language and other semiotic resources, the role of consciousness and concepts, the nature of metaphor, the specificity of human evolution and development, the relation between cognitive semiotics and related fields, and other central topics. They are grouped in four sections: (i) Meta-theoretical perspectives, (ii) Semiotic development and evolution, (iii) Meaning across media, modes and modalities, (iv) Language, blends and metaphors.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Chapter 1. Introduction: Cognitive Semiotics Comes of Age (Jordan Zlatev / Göran Sonesson / Piotr Konderak)
  • 0. Introduction
  • 1. Part I: Meta-theoretical perspectives
  • 2. Part II: Semiotic development and evolution
  • 3. Part III: Meaning across media, modes and modalities
  • 4. Part IV: Language, blends and metaphors
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • Part I. Metatheoretical Perspectives
  • Chapter 2. Mutual Enlightenment: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Embodied Simulation Hypothesis (Carlos A. Pérez)
  • 1. Introduction: phenomenology and cognitive semiotics
  • 2. Phenomenological elucidation and cognitive semiotics
  • 2.1. The “embodied simulation hypothesis”
  • 2.2. Phenomenology, language and perception in the early Husserl
  • 2.3. Meaning and the embodied simulation hypothesis
  • 2.4. Time and the dynamics of perception
  • 2.5. Language and time
  • 3. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 3. A Cognitive Semiotic Perspective on the Nature and Limitations of Concepts and Conceptual Frameworks (Joel Parthemore)
  • 1. Introduction: From cognitive science to cognitive semiotics
  • 2. The emergence of cognitive semiotics
  • 3. Concepts and theories of concepts
  • 3.1. Concepts: Attempt at a definition
  • 3.2. Theories of concepts
  • 3.3. The Unified Conceptual Space Theory (UCST)
  • 3.4. Knowledge representation
  • 4. A cognitive semiotic perspective on concepts
  • 5. A cognitive semiotic perspective on concepts: The case of metaphor
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter 4. Agency in Biosemiotics and Enactivism (Morten Tønnessen)
  • 1. Introduction: what is an agent?
  • 2. Biosemiotic understanding of agency
  • 2.1. Hoffmeyer
  • 2.2. Sharov
  • 3. Enactive understandings of agency
  • 3.1. Gallagher
  • 3.2. Thompson
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 5. Design Semiotics with an Agentive Approach: An Alternative to Current Semiotic Analysis of Artifacts (Juan Carlos Mendoza Collazos)
  • 1. Introduction: the need for a new design semiotics
  • 2. What is agentive semiotics?
  • 3. Application of the agentive approach to design semiotics
  • 3.1. Conditions of agency
  • 3.2. Conditions of agential resolution
  • 3.3. Conditions of artifacts
  • 3.4. Enaction complexity and taxonomy of failures
  • 4. Conclusions
  • Chapter 6. Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Science: The Case of Physical Chemistry (Michael May / Karen Skriver / Gert Dandanell)
  • 1. Introduction: The theoretical landscape
  • 1.1 Situating a cognitive semiotics of science among other approaches
  • 1.2. Science and science learning in semiotics
  • 1.3. Science and science learning in semiology and functional linguistics
  • 1.4. Science and science learning in cognitive science
  • 2. Chemical reaction kinetics: a historical introduction
  • 2.1. The foundation of chemical kinetics
  • 2.2. The role of imagination and language in science: J. van’t Hoff and W. Ostwald
  • 3. The different perspectives of kinetics and thermodynamics
  • 3.1. Perspectives as indicated on a lexical level
  • 3.2. Perspective as grammatical construal: the concept of activation energy barrier
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Part II. Semiotic Development and Evolution
  • Chapter 7. Meaning, Consciousness, and the Onset of Language (Lorraine McCune)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Organization and concepts
  • 3. Piaget’s cognitive theory
  • 3.1. Meaning without mental representation
  • 3.2. Development of representational meaning in play
  • 4. Embodying symbols in the vocal medium
  • 4.1. From natural meaning to personal symbol: The role of laryngeal vocalization
  • 4.2. Phonetic Resources in the transition to language: Vocal Motor Schemes
  • 5. Conclusions: From pre-symbolic meaning to referential language
  • Appendix
  • Chapter 8. The “Symbol Grounding Problem” Reinterpreted from the Perspective of Language Acquisition (Mutsumi Imai)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. How children come to realize that speech sounds are symbols
  • 3. Fast mapping of word meanings
  • 4. Constructing the lexical systems by combining fast and slow learning
  • 5. What cognitive functions make system construction possible?
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 9. Key Roles of Found Symbolic Objects in Hominin Physical and Cultural Evolution: The Found Symbol Hypothesis (Keith E. Nelson)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Objects with symbolic significance at archaeological sites/layers dating to 200,000 or more years ago
  • 3. Brain development, brain sizes, and brain organization
  • 3.1. Brain sizes for children, modern primates, and early hominins
  • 4. Experimental documentation of symbol learning by young children
  • 5. Conclusions and predictions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter 10. Mindreading, Mind-travelling and the Proto-discursive Origins of Language (Francesco Ferretti / Ines Adornetti)
  • 1. Introduction1
  • 2. The primacy of microanalysis and sentence
  • 3. From microanalysis to macroanalysis: evidence from the study of pathologies of language
  • 4. At the origins of human language
  • 4.1. Relevance Theory reconsidered
  • 5. Cognitive systems underlying discourse coherence
  • 5.1 Temporal navigation
  • 5.2. Spatial navigation
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Chapter 11. From Conversation to Language: An Evolutionary Sensory-Motor Account (Alessandra Chiera)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The sentence-computational approach to language
  • 3. Empirical studies of the semantics-pragmatics interface
  • 4. The evolution of language in a top-down perspective
  • 5. Pragmatic alignment as the key for communicating
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 12. Protolanguage as Formulaic Communicaction (Serena Nicchiarelli)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Proto-derby: Compositionality or holophrasis?
  • 3. A possible pantomimic foundation of protolanguage
  • 4. Fossil in action: formulaic language
  • 5. The neurolinguistics of formulaic language
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Part III. Meaning across Media, Modes and Modalities
  • Chapter 13. From Mimesis to Meaning: A Systematics of Gestural Mimesis for Concrete and Abstract Referential Gestures (Cornelia Müller)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Mimesis and poetics: Aristotle’s systematics of different forms of mimesis
  • 3. Forms of mimesis in gestures: The Aristotelian systematics as framework for an embodied mimetic semantics
  • 3.1. Media of gestural mimesis
  • 3.2. Objects of gestural mimesis
  • 3.3. Modes of gestural mimesis: acting and representing as techniques of gesture creation
  • 4. Conclusion: Mimesis grounds gestural meaning in experience
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter 14. Verbal and Nonverbal Markers of Impolite Behavior in Russian Language and Non-Verbal Code (Grigory Kreydlin / Lidia Khesed)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Methodology
  • 3. The category of politeness vs. the category of impoliteness: common and distinctive features
  • 4. The basic script of Russian impolite communicative behavior
  • 5. The semantics of the Russian words грубый, дерзкий and хамский
  • 6. Russian non-verbal signs of impoliteness
  • 7. Conclusions
  • Chapter 15. Symmetrical Reasoning in Language and Culture: On Ritual Knots and Embodied Cognition (Jamin Pelkey)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Anthropological and semiotic context
  • 3. Proposed embodied grounding
  • 4. Proposed methodology for cognitive trials
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 16. Cognitive Semiotics of Mental Disorders, with Focus on Hallucinations (Štěpán Pudlák)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The current status of theories of the semiotics of mental disorders
  • 3. The psychiatric perspective
  • 4. The cognitive semiotic approach
  • 5. The indexicality of hallucinations
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 17. Pictorial Responses and Projected Realities: On an Elicitation Procedure and its Ramifications (Gisela Bruche-Schulz)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Remembering and meaning
  • 2.1. The notion of schema
  • 2.2. Line drawings and conceptual ground
  • 3. The data
  • 4. Provinces of meaning, accents of reality, and response types
  • 4.1. Scenes and scenarios: figurative and diagrammatic components
  • 4.2. Dutifully obliging or fun and play
  • 4.2.1. Singular icons, diagrammatic analogies, and engagement with “reality”
  • 4.2.2. Analogies and schematics: Parallelisms between conceptual structures
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • The sources of the excerpt
  • Chapter 18. Iconic Properties are Lost when Translating Visual Graphics to Text for Accessibility (Peter Coppin / Ambrose Li / Michael Carnevale)
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2. The graphic-linguistic distinction: Implications for sonic interfaced design
  • 2.1. 2D vs sequential
  • 2.2. Relation symbols and object symbols
  • 2.3. Analogue vs digital
  • 2.4. Intrinsic vs extrinsic constraints
  • 2.5. Summarizing extensions of the graphic-linguistic distinction into the sonic domain
  • 2.6. Recasting the graphic-linguistic distinction in semiotics terms
  • 3. A provisional model
  • 3.1. Perception-action cycles and predictions
  • 3.2. The anatomy of perception-action
  • 3.2.1 Pictorial properties of graphics (and comparison to the semiotic notion of iconic)
  • 3.2.2. Symbolic properties of graphics
  • 3.3. Model extended to sound (and cross-modal representation)
  • 3.4. Applying the extended model to the graphic-linguistic distinction
  • 3.5. Applying the model to an example design problem
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Part IV: Language, blends and metaphors
  • Chapter 19. Deonstemic Modals in Legal Discourse: The Cognitive Semiotics of Layered Actions (Todd Oakley)
  • 1. Cognitive semiotics and institutional discourse
  • 2. Linguistic modality: A tripartite model
  • 2.1. Deontic (root) modality
  • 2.2. Enunciatory modality
  • 2.3. Epistemic modality
  • 2.4. Ambiguous cases and the “necessity test”
  • 3. Cognitive semiotics and the dynamics of rigid institutions
  • 3.1. Rhetorical situations
  • 3.2. Layering
  • 4. Case study: 33 influential SCOTUS opinions
  • 4.1. Deontic must
  • 4.2. Enunciatory must
  • 4.3. Epistemic must
  • 4.4. Deonstemic must
  • 4.5. Quantitative analysis of must
  • 5. Discourse layers in SCOTUS opinions
  • 5.1. Units of analysis in a cognitive ecology
  • 5.2. A jurisprudential deontology
  • 5.3. SCOTUS: Six Layers of discourse
  • 5.4. Back to McCulloch vs. Maryland (1816)
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Chapter 20. Commutation of Cognitive Source Domains as a Semiotic Tool for Paradigmatic Analysis (Vlado Sušac)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Paradigmatic relations
  • 3. Conceptual metaphor theory
  • 4. Method and analysis
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Chapter 21. The Emergence of Multimodal Metaphors in Brazilian Political-electoral Debates (Maíra Avelar)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical Background: Metaphor theories and multimodality
  • 3. Methodology
  • 3.1. Analytical categories
  • 3.1.1. Gesture excursion
  • 3.1.2. Multimodal metaphoricity in verbal-gestural compounds
  • 3.1.3. Compression in speech turns
  • 3.2. Material
  • 4. Analysis
  • 4.1. Dilma’s speech from the 2010 debate (Sequence #1)
  • 4.2. Serra’s sequence from the 2010 debate (Sequence #2)
  • 4.3. Dilma’s speech from the 2014 debate (Sequence #3)
  • 4.4. Aécio’s sequence from the 2014 debate (Sequence #4)
  • 5. Discussion and conclusions
  • Chapter 22. “A Light in the Darkness”: Making Sense of Spatial and Lightness Perception (Marco Bagli)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Theoretical background
  • 3. Analysis of the texts
  • 3.1. Demian
  • 3.2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
  • 3.3. Blended space
  • 3.4. Discussion
  • 4. The Implicit Association Test
  • 4.1. The in-out / light-dark IAT
  • 4.2. Results and discussion
  • 5. Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Chapter 23. Performative Metaphor in Cultural Practices (Katherine O’Doherty Jensen)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Performative metaphor
  • 3. Food practices
  • 4. Gendered food practices
  • 5. Accounting for gendered food practices
  • 6. Gendered food practices as performative metaphor
  • 7. Conclusion: the character of culture and the challenges of cognitive semiotics
  • Acknowledgement
  • Chapter 24. Objects and Nouns: An Account of the Vision-Language Interface (Francesco-Alessio Ursini)
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Ontologies
  • 2.1. Ontologies: objects
  • 2.2. Ontologies: Noun Phrases
  • 3. The infomorphic approach
  • 3.1. Core notions
  • 3.2. Classification of object types
  • 3.3. Classification of NP types
  • 3.4. Defining infomorphism
  • 4. Three empirical phenomena
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Chapter 25. Linguistic Theory in the Framework of Cognitive Semiotics: The Role of Semio-Syntax (Per Aage Brandt)
  • 1. The meaning of grammar
  • 2. The semiotic architecture of language
  • 3. Grammatical meaning making
  • 4. Conclusions: From language to culture
  • References
  • List of Contributors
  • Index: Subject

Jordan Zlatev / Göran Sonesson / Piotr Konderak (eds.)

Meaning, Mind and Communication

Explorations in Cognitive Semiotics

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About the author

Jordan Zlatev, Professor in Linguistics at Lund University, investigates language in relation to mind and meaning-making.
Göran Sonesson, Professor in Semiotics at Lund University focuses on pictorial and cultural semiotics.
Piotr Konderak, Assistant Professor at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, works in the philosophy of mind.

About the book

This volume constitutes the first anthology of texts in cognitive semiotics – the new transdisciplinary study of meaning, mind and communication that combines concepts and methods from semiotics, cognitive science and linguistics – from a multitude of established and younger scholars. The chapters deal with the interaction between language and other semiotic resources, the role of consciousness and concepts, the nature of metaphor, the specificity of human evolution and development, the relation between cognitive semiotics and related fields, and other central topics. They are grouped in four sections: (i) Meta-theoretical perspectives, (ii) Semiotic development and evolution, (iii) Meaning across media, modes and modalities, (iv) Language, blends and metaphors.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of Contents

Jordan Zlatev, Göran Sonesson & Piotr Konderak

Chapter 1

Introduction: Cognitive Semiotics Comes of Age

Part I. Metatheoretical Perspectives

Carlos A. Pérez

Chapter 2

Mutual Enlightenment: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Embodied Simulation Hypothesis

Joel Parthemore

Chapter 3

A Cognitive Semiotic Perspective on the Nature and Limitations of Concepts and Conceptual Frameworks

Morten Tønnessen

Chapter 4

Agency in Biosemiotics and Enactivism

Juan Carlos Mendoza Collazos

Chapter 5

Design Semiotics with an Agentive Approach: An Alternative to Current Semiotic Analysis of Artifacts

Michael May, Karen Skriver & Gert Dandanell

Chapter 6

Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Science: The Case of
Physical Chemistry

Part II. Semiotic Development and Evolution

Lorraine McCune

Chapter 7

Meaning, Consciousness, and the Onset of Language5 | 6→

Mutsumi Imai

Chapter 8

The “Symbol Grounding Problem” Reinterpreted from the Perspective of Language Acquisition

Keith E. Nelson

Chapter 9

Key Roles of Found Symbolic Objects in Hominin Physical and Cultural Evolution: The Found Symbol Hypothesis

Francesco Ferretti & Ines Adornetti

Chapter 10

Mindreading, Mind-travelling and the Proto-discursive Origins of Language

Alessandra Chiera

Chapter 11

From Conversation to Language: An Evolutionary Sensory-Motor Account

Serena Nicchiarelli

Chapter 12

Protolanguage as Formulaic Communicaction

Part III. Meaning across Media, Modes and Modalities

Cornelia Müller

Chapter 13

From Mimesis to Meaning: A Systematics of Gestural Mimesis for Concrete and Abstract Referential Gestures

Grigory Kreydlin & Lidia Khesed

Chapter 14

Verbal and Nonverbal Markers of Impolite Behavior in Russian Language and Non-Verbal Code

Jamin Pelkey

Chapter 15

Symmetrical Reasoning in Language and Culture: On Ritual Knots and Embodied Cognition←6 | 7→

Štěpán Pudlák

Chapter 16

Cognitive Semiotics of Mental Disorders, with Focus on Hallucinations

Gisela Bruche-Schulz

Chapter 17

Pictorial Responses and Projected Realities: On an Elicitation Procedure and its Ramifications

Peter Coppin, Ambrose Li & Michael Carnevale

Chapter 18

Iconic Properties are Lost when Translating Visual Graphics to Text for Accessibility

Part IV: Language, Blends and Metaphors

Todd Oakley

Chapter 19

Deonstemic Modals in Legal Discourse: The Cognitive Semiotics of Layered Actions

Vlado Sušac

Chapter 20

Commutation of Cognitive Source Domains as a Semiotic Tool for Paradigmatic Analysis

Maíra Avelar

Chapter 21

The Emergence of Multimodal Metaphors in Brazilian Political-electoral Debates

Marco Bagli

Chapter 22

“A Light in the Darkness”: Making Sense of Spatial and Lightness Perception

Katherine O’Doherty Jensen

Chapter 23

Performative Metaphor in Cultural Practices←7 | 8→

Francesco-Alessio Ursini

Chapter 24

Objects and Nouns: An Account of the Vision-Language Interface

Per Aage Brandt

Chapter 25

Linguistic Theory in the Framework of Cognitive Semiotics:
The Role of Semio-Syntax

References

List of Contributors

Index: Subject←8 | 9→

Jordan Zlatev, Göran Sonesson & Piotr Konderak

Chapter 1

Introduction:
Cognitive Semiotics Comes of Age

0. Introduction

A decade since the appearance of the journal Cognitive Semiotics, the establishment of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS) in 2013, and two successful international conferences, in Lund in 2014 and Lublin 2016, cognitive semiotics can hardly be characterized as an “emerging” discipline anymore. It is already here. Yet, we who are involved with this field are often pressed to answer: what is it really?

The chapters in this volume, which originate from the IACS conference in Lund, are a kind of extensional answer to this question: this is what cognitive semiotics is like! The reader may note that the editors of the volume and authors of this introduction – who have served as “founding fathers” or, less pretentiously, as the main organizers of the first two international conferences – do not participate as authors in this anthology. Rather, we have taken up the role of “mid-wives”, for a proper mix of metaphors, of this important project, which in effect is the first published volume of explorations in cognitive semiotics.

This discipline of cognitive semiotics can be described as the study of meaning, mind and communication, as reflected by the title of this book. Admittedly, this is a broad object of study, but as this volume aims to show, there is both an internal coherence to, and an important mission for, cognitive semiotics: to help in “mending the gap between science and the humanities”, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould (2003). Crucially, this is to be done through mutual respect and methodological understanding, rather than a reductionist takeover from the side of natural science, or a postmodernist relativism from the side of the liberal arts.

In previous works, we have highlighted a number of features of the new discipline of cognitive semiotics (Sonesson 2009, 2012; Zlatev 2012, 2015). All of these features do not have to be fulfilled, but together they define a prototype-kind of structure; as we can see, the chapters in this volume conform to this characterization by displaying at least the first two features, and in many cases more.

The first feature is that cognitive semiotics focuses on the study of meaning, and does so through a trans-disciplinary (implying tighter contact than “interdisciplinary”) combination of methods and concepts from at least semiotics, cognitive science, and linguistics. As these fields are interdisciplinary themselves, this opens the doors to a number of related fields such as anthropology (e.g. Pelkey, this volume), graphic reasoning (Coppin, this volume), cognitive development (McCune,←9 | 10→ this volume), language acquisition (Imai, this volume), and political discourse analysis (e.g. Avelar, this volume, Sušac, this volume).

The second feature is what we have referred to as the conceptual-empirical loop (Zlatev 2012) or more adequately: spiral (Zlatev 2015). One particular variant of this is what we have called “the dialectics of phenomenology and experiments” (Sonesson 2013). The point is that cognitive semiotics takes a keen interest in the analysis of concepts, not unlike philosophy, starting with proverbially ambiguous notions such as meaning, sign, language, culture, and consciousness. But to do so adequately, it is necessary to plunge into empirical studies where these phenomena are studied through scientific (in the broad sense) methods, and then re-emerge, reinvigorated, on the conceptual side. Conversely, empirical investigations, for example on the difficult issues concerning how language emerges in evolution and development (discussed in Part 2), inevitably become involved with conceptual issues, since “what”-questions constrain the answers to “how and why”-questions. This also has the advantage of making it possible to specify psychological experimental paradigms in order to answer specifically semiotic questions, and of integrating experimental results into discussions within semiotics, phenomenology, and other variants of philosophy (see Sonesson 2013, Pérez, this volume).

A third feature, more or less explicitly manifested in cognitive semiotic research, is to proceed in the study of the phenomenon in question – be it children’s symbolic play, the use of metaphors, symmetrical reasoning, hallucination etc. – by combining methods using a first-person perspective (of the analyst or the participant), a third-person perspective of detached observation and experimentation (allowing quantification in many cases), united by a second-person perspective acknowledging that every form of scientific exploration is an act of communication, between experimenter and participant, analyst and informant, author and reader etc. The chapters by Parthemore, Bruche-Schulz and Pudlak discuss this procedure overtly, but it is present in many of the other chapters, especially in those influenced by phenomenology, which is in itself important enough to be given as a fourth feature of cognitive semiotics.

The “scientific study of consciousness”, or more adequately “the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience” (Sokolowski 2000: 2), phenomenology is the philosophical tradition inaugurated by Edmund Husserl over a century ago, and continued by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others up to the present day (e.g. Zahavi and Gallagher 2008). In cognitive semiotics it is especially useful for the study of subjectivity (e.g. perception, affect, sense-making) from the “inside” in a manner that is intersubjective, providing results that are, in a sense, objective (see Sonesson 2015a). It is also a very useful tool for analysing the difference between signs and other meanings (see Sonesson 1989, 2012). Further, as phenomenologists have been consistently anti-reductionist while open to science, concepts and methods from phenomenology have been very productive for researchers searching for “mutual enlightenment” (Gallagher 1997, see Pérez, this volume) between lived experience and detached←10 | 11→ experimentation. The chapters by Pérez, Parthemore, Mendoza Collazos, McCune, Pelkey, and Bruche-Schulz include explicit acknowledgments of this, but traces can be observed in many of the other chapters, such as in the analysis of gestures (Müller) or language (Brandt).

The last feature is that of meaning dynamism, or the emphasis on the study of the various forms of meaning, not as objects or structures, but as processes, on various time scales, from those of evolution and development (see Part 2), to those of “the human level” of social interaction (the analysis of gestures, “multimodal metaphors” and language use in Part 3 and 4, or of language), to the micro-level of “time consciousness” in retention and pretension process (in the chapters by Perez and Pelkey).

So what kind of topics has cognitive semiotics been applied to so far? If we look at some representative previous publications we can list: the relation between attention and rhetoric (Oakely 2001), dynamic linguistic semantics (Brandt 2004), the evolution of consciousness (Donald 2001), children’s gestures (Andrén 2010) and pictorial competence (Lenninger 2012), the theoretical integration of semiotics and phenomenology (Sonesson 1989, 2009, 2015a), intersubjectivity and mimesis in evolution (Zlatev 2008a) and ontogenetic development (Zlatev 2013, 2014). Most of these topics are also addressed in the chapters of this volume, which we have grouped into four parts, with each part and contribution presented in the remainder of this introductory chapter, followed by some brief concluding words.

1. Part I: Meta-theoretical perspectives

Details

Pages
482
Year
2016
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631701300
ISBN (PDF)
9783653049480
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631701317
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631657041
DOI
10.3726/978-3-653-04948-0
Language
English
Publication date
2017 (March)
Keywords
Language Consciousness Phenomenology Evolution Development Metaphor
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2016. 482 pp., 86 graphs, 18 tables

Biographical notes

Jordan Zlatev (Volume editor) Göran Sonesson (Volume editor) Piotr Konderak (Volume editor)

Jordan Zlatev, Professor in Linguistics at Lund University, investigates language in relation to mind and meaning-making. Göran Sonesson, Professor in Semiotics at Lund University focuses on pictorial and cultural semiotics. Piotr Konderak, Assistant Professor at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, works in the philosophy of mind.

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