Polysemy, Diachrony, and the Circle of Cognition

Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-90-04-44951-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 28, 234 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 534 g

Reihe: Brill's Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture

Verbs of mental states or activity constitute a subject of considerable interest to both Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. They promise to open a window on the invisible workings of the mind, while at the same time displaying a wide variety of historical sources across languages. In this book Michael Fortescue presents an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world’s languages. The relationship among the cognitive verbs of individual languages is essentially one of metonymy, and the book investigates in detail the specific metonymic relationships involved, as revealed largely by the polysemous spread of word meanings. The data is projected against a circular ‘map’ of interrelated cognitive categories.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fortescue, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Historische & Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures and Tables

Abbreviations

1 Introduction

2 Thinking in General

3 Understanding

4 Knowing

5 Believing

6 Remembering

7 Thinking about

8 Judging (Considering)

9 Calculating

10 Deciding

11 Guessing

12 Intending

13 Imagining

14 Expecting

15 Wishing

16 Emotional Feelings

17 Surprise

18 Experiencing (Feeling)

19 Perceiving (Noticing)

20 Recognizing

21 Full Circle

22 What a Surprise! A Closer Look at a Cinderella Category

23 The Cross-Linguistic Expression of Categories of Emotion

24 Seeming: An Odd One Out?

25 Guess: How a Single Category Can Involve All Others

26 Conclusions

Sources for Languages Cited

Appendix 1: A Sentimental Circle

Appendix 2: Raw Lexical Data

References

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Fortescue, Ph.D. Edinburgh University (1978), is professor emeritus in Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He published widely in Arctic languages, including West Greenlandic (Croom Helm, 1984) and (co-authored) The Comparative Eskimo Dictionary(Alaska Native Language Center, 2010). And within cognitive studies: The Abstraction Engine (Benjamins 2017).