Perspectives on abstract concepts : cognition, language and communication / Marianna Bolognesi, Gerard J. Steen.

"Human language is the most powerful communication system that evolution has produced. Within this system, we can talk about things we can physically see, such as cats and tables, but also about more abstract entities, such as theories and feelings. But how are these abstract concepts grounded in human cognition and represented in the mind? How are they constructed in language? And how are they used in natural communication settings? This book addresses these questions through a collection of studies that relate to various theoretical frameworks, ranging from Conceptual Metaphor Theory to Words as Social Tools. Contributors investigate how abstract concepts are grounded in the mind, represented in language, and used in verbal discourse. This richness is matched by a range of methods used throughout the volume, from neuroimaging to computational modeling, and from behavioral experiments to corpus analyses"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The relevance of specific semantic categories in investigating the neural bases of abstract and concrete semantics / Felix R. Dreyer -- Abstract concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors / Claudia Mazzuca and Anna Maria Borghi -- Inferential processing with concrete vs. abstract words and visual cortex / Fabrizio Calzavarini -- Are abstract concepts grounded in bodily mimesis? / Anna Jelec -- Is the acoustic modality relevant for abstract concepts? a study with the Extrinsic Simon Task / Elisa Scerrati, Luisa Lugli, Roberto Nicoletti and Anna Maria Borghi -- Determinants of abstractness and concreteness and their persuasive effects / Lettica Hustinx and Wilbert Spooren -- Acceptability properties of abstract senses in copredication / Elliot Murphy -- Different degrees of abstraction from visual cues in processing concrete nouns / Francesca Franzon and Chiara Zanini -- Cognitive and linguistic aspects of composition in German particle verbs / Sylvia Springorum, Hans Kamp and Sabine Schulte im Walde -- Metaphor in action : action verbs and abstract meaning / Alessandro Panunzi and Paola Vernillo -- Abstract concepts in development : spontaneous production of complex words in Swedish child language / Maria Rosenberg -- The development of the abstract scientific concept of heat energy in a naturalistic classroom setting / Sally Zacharias -- Time domain matrix modeling in cognitive linguistic research / Ievgeniia Bondarenko.

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