Semantic Leaps
Frame-Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction

Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas.

Seana Coulson (Author)

9780521027830, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

320 pages, 16 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

"Most cognitive science work on thought and language focuses on relatively small sets of linguistic examples that only bear on restricted theoretical models. Seana Coulson's book Semantic Leaps is a wonderful exception to this trend. Her work addresses a wide range of diverse, complex linguistic phenomena, and she aims to capture how people construct meaning in terms of flexible theoretical framework of conceptual blending theory. Coulson's research and writing make use of principles and empirical methods from linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. The results of her studies push the boundaries of current cognitive science thinking about meaning construction. Semantic Leaps takes several small, but significant empirical steps, yet contains findings and ideas that represent a giant leap forward for the interdisciplinary study of mind and meaning." Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting and conceptual blending. Frame-shifting is semantic reanalysis in which existing elements in the contextual representation are reorganized into a new frame. Conceptual blending is a set of cognitive operations for combining partial cognitive models. By addressing linguistic phenomena often ignored in traditional meaning research, Coulson explains how processes of cross-domain mapping, frame-shifting and conceptual blending enhance the explanatory adequacy of traditional frame-based systems for natural language processing. The focus is on how the constructive processes speakers use to assemble, link and adapt simple cognitive models underlie a broad range of productive language behaviour.

Acknowledgments
1. Semantic leaps
Part I. Frame-Shifting: 2. Frame-shifting and models of language processing
3. Models of sentential integration
4. Frame-shifting and the brain
Part II. Conceptual Blending: 5. Conceptual blending in modified noun phrases
6. Conceptual blending in metaphor and analogy
7. Counterfactual conditionals
Part III. Applications: Blending, Framing, and Blaming: 8. Framing in moral discourse
9. Frame-shifting and scalar implicature
10. The space structuring model
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR]