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.

In Ten Lectures on Construction Grammar and Typology, William Croft presents a unified theory of linguistic form and meaning that encompasses crosslinguistic diversity, verbalization and language change.

Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics as an Empirical Science details the relationship between form and meaning in language, especially at the systematic level of morphology. The role of metaphor and metonymy in elaborating meaning are investigated, as well as the structuring of semantics in terms of prototypes and radial categories. Implications for cultural studies and pedagogical applications are explored. The bulk of examples and data are drawn from the Slavic languages.

"These lectures deal with the role of cognitive modelling in language-based meaning construction. To make meaning people use a small set of principles which they apply to different types of conceptual characterizations. This yields predictable meaning effects, which, when stably associated with specific grammatical patterns, result in constructions or fixed form-meaning parings. This means that constructional meaning can be described on the basis of the same principles that people use to make inferences. This way of looking at pragmatics and grammar through cognition allows us to relate a broad range of pragmatic and grammatical phenomena, among them argument-structure characterizations, implicational, illocutionary, and discourse structure, and such figures of speech as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and irony"--

The present book contains a transcribed version of the lectures given by Professor Zoltán Kövecses in November 2010 as one of the three forum speakers for the 8th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. The topics presented in this book deal with the language and conceptualization of emotions, cross-cultural variation in metaphor, metaphor and metonymy in discourse, and the issue of the relationship between language, mind, and culture from a cognitive linguistic perspective.

Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics presents ten lectures, in both audio and transcribed text, given by George Lakoff in Beijing in April 2004. Lakoff gives an account of the background of cognitive linguistics, and basic mechanisms of thought, grammar, neural theory of language, metaphor, implications for Philosophy, and political linguistics. He does so in a manner that is accessible for anyone, including undergraduate level students and a general audience. With the massive experience of being a linguist for over 50 years, and being one of the founding fathers of the field, George Lakoff is one of the best possible experts to introduce Cognitive Linguistics to anyone. The lectures for this book were given at The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics in April 2004.

Conceiving of language and cognition as biological phenomena, these lectures provide and illustrate a coherent, integrated theoretical framework for studying essentially any aspect of language systems, language use, language change, and language evolution.

These lectures discuss cognitive modelling in language-based meaning construction. It puts forward a unified analytical framework for several linguistic phenomena, including different types of constructions, traditional implicature and speech acts, and figures of speech like metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and irony.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics combines the interest in meaning of Cognitive Linguistics with the interest in social variation of sociolinguistics, converging on two domains of enquiry: variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation. These Ten Lectures, a transcribed version of talks given by professor Geeraerts in 2009 at Beihang University in Beijing, introduce and illustrate both dimensions. The ‘variation of meaning’ perspective involves looking at types of semantic and categorial variation, at the role of social and cultural factors in semantic variation and change, and at the interplay of stereotypes, prototypes and norms. The ‘meaning of variation’ perspective involves looking at the way in which categorization processes of the type studied by Cognitive Linguistics shape how scholars and laymen think about language variation.

This lively lecture series by a leading expert introduces the theory, practice and application of a versatile, rigorous and well-developed approach to cross-linguistic semantics: the NSM approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka. Topics include: history and philosophy of the study of meaning, semantic primes and molecules, emotions, evaluation, verbs and event structure, cultural key words and scripts. Case studies come from English, Chinese, Danish, and other languages. Applications in language teaching and intercultural education are also covered, along with comparisons between NSM and other leading approaches to linguistic semantics. The book will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics at all levels, communication and translation scholars, and anyone interested in a systematic and non Anglocentric approach to meaning, culture and cognition.