Gilles Fauconnier

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 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 labouratories 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.