This book is an attempt to re-evaluate some basic assumptions about language, communication, and cognition in the light of the new epistemology of autopoiesis as the theory of the living. Starting with a critique of common myths about language and communication, the author goes on to argue for a new understanding of language and cognition as functional adaptive activities in a consensual domain of interactions. He shows that such understanding is, in fact, what marks a variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks in contemporary non-Cartesian cognitive science; thus, cognitive science is in the process of working out new epistemological foundations for the study of language and cognition. In Part Two, the traditional concept of grammar is reassessed from the vantage point of autopoietic epistemology, and an analysis of specific grammatical phenomena in English and Russian is undertaken, revealing common cognitive mechanisms at work in linguistic categories.

Written by leading experts in language and cognition, this groundbreaking behavior analysis textbook brings the study of verbal behavior into the 21st century with cutting-edge research. Students and clinicians in the burgeoning field of applied behavior analysis will find the theoretical foundation they need to effectively help the increasingly diverse clients seeking their services. The origins of behavior analysis can be traced to the pioneering work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner’s fundamental insights into how human behavior is shaped, maintained, and can be changed were powerful and far-reaching. Some of Skinner’s most innovative contributions were in the study of language. Behavior analytic work in the area of language and cognition did not stop with Skinner, however. Indeed, Skinner’s work in this area has inspired considerable expansion, particularly with an eye toward more sophisticated verbal and cognitive repertoires. This important volume provides an overview of the concepts and core behavioral processes involved in language and cognition. You’ll find a deeper exploration of complex linguistic and cognitive skills, including generative responding, learning by observation, and perspective taking. Also included are clinically supported interventions based in mindfulness, psychological flexibility, and emotion regulation to help clients improve complex language, social, and academic skills. The future of behavior analysis is here. With its focus on the importance of language and cognition, this textbook is a must-read for anyone studying or practicing in the science of behavior.

The volume presents language as fully integrated with human existence. On this view, language is not essentially ‘symbolic’, not represented inside minds or brains, and most certainly not determined by micro-social rules and norms. Rather, language is part of our ecology. It emerges when bodies co-ordinate vocal and visible gesture to integrate events with different histories. Enacting feeling, expression and wordings, language permeates the collective, individual and affective life of living beings. It is a profoundly distributed, multi-centric activity that binds people together as they go about their lives. Distributed Language pursues this perspective both theoretically and in relation to empirical work. Empirically, it reports studies on the anticipatory dynamics of reading, its socio-cognitive consequences, Shakespearean theatre, what images evoke (in brain and word), and solving insight problems. Theoretically, the volume challenges linguistic autonomy from overlapping theoretical positions. First, it is argued that language exploits a species specific form of semiotic cognition. Second, it is suggested that the central function of language lies in realizing values that derive from our ecosystemic existence. Third, this is ascribed to how cultural and biological symbols co-regulate the dynamics that shape human activity. Fourth, it is argued that language, far from being organism-centred, gives us an extended ecology in which our co-ordination is saturated by values and norms that are derived from our sociocultural environment. The contributions to this volume expand on those originally published in Pragmatics & Cognition 17:3 (2009).

Neurobiologen og systemteoretikeren Humberto R. Maturana (f. 1928) anskueliggør sin filosofi og teorier gennem samtale og anekdoter, og samtidig dannes et billede af personen Maturana og hans livsanskuelse

Memory, Mind and Language celebrates the 30th anniversary of the The Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL) and the main contribution is the history of those first 30 years. The book is also an overview of trends and basic problems in linguistics in the first decennium of the 21st century. It takes up a number of topics in the field, among them the question of synchrony vs. diachrony in the language sciences, and issues of how to investigate the relationship between language, brain and mind. The book proposes some preliminary solutions to that problem, and, most significantly, it touches on both general and specific issues in theory and analysis, e.g. ‘adverbs in English and Norwegian,’ ‘verb semantics,’ ‘pronouns in Estonian,’ ‘morphology and neurolinguistics,’ ‘word order and morphology,’ ‘the nature and use of prepotions’ and ‘speech acts.’ The contributing scholars come from a variety of traditions in linguistics, a fact that shows the broadness of the content.

The aim of this book is to advocate and promote network models of linguistic systems that are both based on thorough mathematical models and substantiated in terms of linguistics. In this way, the book contributes first steps towards establishing a statistical network theory as a theoretical basis of linguistic network analysis the boarder of the natural sciences and the humanities. This book addresses researchers who want to get familiar with theoretical developments, computational models and their empirical evaluation in the field of complex linguistic networks. It is intended to all those who are interested in statistical models of linguistic systems from the point of view of network research. This includes all relevant areas of linguistics ranging from phonological, morphological and lexical networks on the one hand and syntactic, semantic and pragmatic networks on the other. In this sense, the volume concerns readers from many disciplines such as physics, linguistics, computer science and information science. It may also be of interest for the upcoming area of systems biology with which the chapters collected here share the view on systems from the point of view of network analysis.

This book proposes a radically evolutionary approach to biolinguistics that consists in considering human language as a form of species-specific intelligence entirely embodied in the corporeal structures of Homo sapiens. The book starts with a historical reconstruction of two opposing biolinguistic models: the Chomskian Biolinguistic Model (CBM) and the Darwinian Biolinguistic Model (DBM). The second part compares the two models and develops into a complete reconsideration of the traditional biolinguistic issues in an evolutionary perspective, highlighting their potential influence on the paradigm of biologically oriented cognitive science. The third part formulates the philosophical, evolutionary and experimental basis of an extended theory of linguistic performativity within a naturalistic perspective of pragmatics of verbal language. The book proposes a model in which the continuity between human and non-human primates is linked to the gradual development of the articulatory and neurocerebral structures, and to a kind of prelinguistic pragmatics which characterizes the common nature of social learning. In contrast, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic skills that mark the learning of historical-natural languages are seen as a rapid acceleration of cultural evolution. The book makes clear that this acceleration will not necessarily favour the long-term adaptations for Homo sapiens.

Argues that biology plays a more central role in language acquisition than teaching or learning.

This handbook compares the main analytic frameworks and methods of contemporary linguistics. It offers a unique overview of linguistic theory, revealing the common concerns of competing approaches. By showing their current and potential applications it provides the means by which linguists and others can judge what are the most useful models for the task in hand. Distinguished scholars from all over the world explain the rationale and aims of over thirty explanatory approaches to the description, analysis, and understanding of language. Each chapter considers the main goals of the model; the relation it proposes from between lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology; the way it defines the interactions between cognition and grammar; what it counts as evidence; and how it explains linguistic change and structure. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis offers an indispensable guide for everyone researching any aspect of language including those in linguistics, comparative philology, cognitive science, developmental philology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, computational science, and artificial intelligence. This second edition has been updated to include seven new chapters looking at linguistic units in language acquisition, conversation analysis, neurolinguistics, experimental phonetics, phonological analysis, experimental semantics, and distributional typology.

Analysing language data systematically and looking closely at how people formulate their thoughts can reveal astonishing insights about the human mind. Without presupposing specific subject knowledge, this book gently introduces its readers to theoretical insights as well as practical principles for systematic linguistic analysis from a cognitive perspective. Drawing on Thora Tenbrink's twenty years' experience in both linguistics and cognitive science, this book offers theoretical guidance and practical advice for doing cognitive discourse analysis. It covers areas of analysis as diverse as attention, perspective, granularity, certainty, inference, transformation, communication, and cognitive strategies, using inspiring examples from many different projects. Simple techniques and tools are used to allow readers new to the subject easy ways to apply the methods, without the need for complex technologies, whilst the cross-disciplinary approach can be applied to a diverse range of research purposes and contexts in which language and thought play a role.