As we think and talk, rich arrays of mental spaces and connections between them are constructed unconsciously. Conceptual integration of mental spaces leads to new meaning, global insight, and compressions useful for memory and creativity. A powerful aspect of conceptual integration networks is the dynamic emergence of novel structure in all areas of human life (science, religion, art, ...). The emergence of complex metaphors creates our conceptualization of time. The same operations play a role in material culture generally. Technology evolves to produce cultural human artefacts such as watches, gauges, compasses, airplane cockpit displays, with structure specifically designed to match conceptual inputs and integrate with them into stable blended frames of perception and action that can be memorized, learned by new generations, and thus culturally transmitted.

This title, first published in 1979, centres on control and binding in networks of anaphora. A wide variety of phenomena which are superficially global rather than local processes are examined, and the study deals directly with aspects of natural logic and finds its empirical motivation in concrete grammatical phenomena, thereby accounting for similarities and differences between natural languages and artificial formal logics. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

This title, first published in 1979, centres on control and binding in networks of anaphora. A wide variety of phenomena which are superficially global rather than local processes are examined, and the study deals directly with aspects of natural logic and finds its empirical motivation in concrete grammatical phenomena, thereby accounting for similarities and differences between natural languages and artificial formal logics. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought.
These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract change expressions in Japanese; mood in Spanish; deictic expressions; copular sentences in Japanese; conditional constructions; and reference in American Sign Language.
The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists.
The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.

Meaning in everyday thought and language is constructed at lightning speed. We are not conscious of the staggering complexity of the cognitive operations that drive our simplest behavior. This book reveals the creativity that underlies our effortless use of language in everyday life, when we engage in conversation, understand humor, or solve puzzles. The capacities and principles that we develop from infancy for ordinary thinking and talking are also the ones that drive scientific and artistic thought, high-level reasoning, and conceptual change. Researchers and graduate students in linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy of language will find this text to be a fascinating addition to their collections.

First published in 1985 (MIT Press), Fauconnier's influential book, Mental Spaces, was instrumental in shaping the new field of cognitive linguistics. The concept of mental spaces--that we develop constructs during discourse that are distinct from linguistic constructs but are established by linguistic expressions--provides a powerful new approach to problems in philosophy and cognitive science concerning thought and language. It includes a new preface that provides context for the theory, and a new foreword by George Lakoff and Eve Sweetser (both of U.C. Berkeley).

In its first two decades, much of cognitive science focused on such mental functions as memory, learning, symbolic thought, and language acquisition --the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers, and the cutting-edge research in cognitive science is increasingly focused on the more mysterious, creative aspects of the mind. The Way We Think is a landmark synthesis that exemplifies this new direction. The theory of conceptual blending is already widely known in laboratories throughout the world; this book is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that all learning and all thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences. These blends are then themselves blended together into an increasingly rich structure that makes up our mental functioning in modern society. A child's entire development consists of learning and navigating these blends. The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, and concept of category; and the rules by which we use blends to understand ideas that are new to us. The result is a bold, exciting, and accessible new view of how the mind works.