Prior to the twentieth century, theories of knowledge were inherently perceptual. Since then, developments in logic, statis- tics, and programming languages have inspired amodal theories that rest on principles fundamentally different from those underlying perception. In addition, perceptual approaches have become widely viewed as untenable because they are assumed to implement record- ing systems, not conceptual systems. A perceptual theory of knowledge is developed here in the context of current cognitive science and neuroscience. During perceptual experience, association areas in the brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor areas to implement perceptual symbols. The stor- age and reactivation of perceptual symbols operates at the level of perceptual components - not at the level of holistic perceptual expe- riences. Through the use of selective attention, schematic representations of perceptual components are extracted from experience and stored in memory (e.g., individual memories of green, purr, hot). As memories of the same component become organized around a com- mon frame, they implement a simulator that produces limitless simulations of the component (e.g., simulations of purr). Not only do such simulators develop for aspects of sensory experience, they also develop for aspects of proprioception (e.g., lift, run) and introspec- tion (e.g., compare, memory, happy, hungry). Once established, these simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences. These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and ab- stract concepts, thereby implementing a fully functional conceptual system. Productivity results from integrating simulators combinato- rially and recursively to produce complex simulations. Propositions result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations. Abstract concepts are grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. Thus, a per- ceptual theory of knowledge can implement a fully functional conceptual system while avoiding problems associated with amodal sym- bol systems. Implications for cognition, neuroscience, evolution, development, and artificial intelligence are explored.

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Perceptual symbol systems.

1. What Is Metaphor? 2. Common Source and Target Domains 3. Kinds of Metaphor 4. Metaphor in Literature 5. Nonlinguistic Realizations of Conceptual Metaphors 6. The Basis of Metaphor 7. The Partial Nature of Metaphorical Mappings 8. Cognitive Models, Metaphors, and Embodiment 9. Metaphorical Entailments 10. The Scope of Metaphor 11. Metaphor Systems 12. Another Figure: Metonymy 13. The Universality of Conceptual Metaphors 14. Cultural Variation in Metaphor and Metonymy 15. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Idioms 16. Metaphor and Metonymy in the Study of Language 17. Metaphors and Blends 18. Metaphor in Discourse 19. How Does All This 20. Hang Together? GLOSSARY SOLUTIONS TO EXERCISES REFERENCES GENERAL INDEX METAPHOR AND METONYMY INDEX

Metaphor: A Practical Introduction

In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

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Situations and Attitudes.

Gesturing is such an integral yet unconscious part of communication that we are mostly oblivious to it. But if you observe anyone in conversation, you are likely to see his or her fingers, hands, and arms in some form of spontaneous motion. Why? David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, set about answering this question in "Gesture and Thought" with an unlikely accomplice - Tweety Bird. McNeill argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an "imagery-language dialectic" that fuels speech and thought; gestures are the "imagery" and also the components of "language," rather than mere consequences. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the "growth point," a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage. Enter Tweety Bird. In "Gesture and Thought", the central growth point comes from a cartoon. In his quest to eat Tweety Bird, Sylvester the cat first scales the outside of a rain gutter to reach his prey. Unsuccessful, he makes a second attempt by climbing up the inside of the gutter. Tweety, however, drops a bowling ball down the gutter; Sylvester swallows the ball. Over the course of twenty-five years, McNeill showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages. A fascinating pattern emerged. Those who remembered the exact sequence of the cartoon while retelling it all used the same gesture to describe Sylvester's position inside the gutter. Those who forgot, in the retelling, that Sylvester had first climbed the outside of the gutter did not use this gesture at all. Thus that gesture becomes part of the "growth point" - the building block of language and thought. An ambitious project in the ongoing study of the relationship of how we communicate and its connection to thought, "Gesture and Thought" is a work of such consequence that it will influence all subsequent linguistic and evolutionary theory on the subject.

Gesture and Thought

This article presents an explicit method that can be reliably employed to identify metaphorically used words in discourse. Our aim is to provide metaphor scholars with a tool that may be flexibly applied to many research contexts. We present the "metaphor identification procedure" (MIP), followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to identifying metaphorically used words in 1 text. We then suggest a format for reporting the results of MIP, and present the data from our case study describing the empirical reliability of the procedure, discuss several complications associated with using the procedure in practice, and then briefly compare MIP to other proposals on metaphor identification. The final section of the paper suggests ways that MIP may be employed in disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of metaphor.

MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse

Review of “Language and Gesture” by David McNeill (Ed.)

While modality may offer self-evident cases of polysemy (between the root and epistemic senses), there are other areas of the lexicon where few would even suggest that differences in usage correspond to a polysemy between linguistic domains. The purpose of this chapter is to show that conjunctions, like modal verbs, are “ambiguous” among usages in the content, epistemic, and conversational domains. A simple analysis of conjunctions as logical operators will prove far too weak to explain the ambiguities in their usage, or to account for the fact that ambiguities between domains are to be observed equally in simple conjunction (and disjunction) and complex lexical conjunctions such as therefore or although . Not only must conjunctions be given a more complex lexical-semantic analysis, but their contribution to sentence semantics must be analyzed in the context of an utterance's polyfunctional status as a bearer of content, as a logical entity, and as the instrument of a speech act. I will give arguments suggesting that (at least for some conjunctions) a lexical-polysemy analysis is implausible, and that instead these conjunctions are examples of what Horn (1985) has called pragmatic ambiguity . In polysemy, a morpheme has several related semantic values; in pragmatic ambiguity (see chapter 1), a single semantics is pragmatically applied in different ways according to pragmatic context. It is interesting to observe that our three-way understanding of utterances as content, epistemic entity, and speech act is relevant to this pragmatic-ambiguity structure, as well as to the polysemy structure of lexical items such as the modals.

Eve Sweetser

Papers

Review of “Language and Gesture” by David McNeill (Ed.)

From Etymology to Pragmatics: Conjunction, coordination, and subordination

Mental Spaces in Grammar: Future and present forms in conditional constructions

Mental Spaces in Grammar: Then and even if : mental-space deixis and referential uniqueness

Mental Spaces in Grammar: Uniqueness and negative stance: only if and if only