Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 4 Seiten: 701-741.

Machery (2009) has proposed that the notion of ‘concept’ ought to be eliminated from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology. I raise three questions about his argument: (1) Is there a meaningful distinction between concepts and background knowledge? (2) Do we need to discard the hybrid view? (3) Are there really categories of things in the world that are the basis for concepts? Although I argue that the answer to all three is ‘no’, I agree with Machery's conclusion that seeking a (...) single characterization of concepts will not be fruitful for understanding cognitive representations and processes. (shrink)

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non‐linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In a computational linguistic study, we demonstrated that co‐occurrences of cities in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit predicted the authentic longitude and latitude of those cities in Middle Earth. In (...) a human study, we showed that human spatial estimates of the location of cities were very similar regardless of whether participants read Tolkien’s texts or memorized a map of Middle Earth. However, text‐based location estimates obtained from statistical linguistic frequencies better predicted the human text‐based estimates than the human map‐based estimates. These findings suggest that language encodes spatial structure of cities, and that human cognitive map representations can come from implicit statistical linguistic patterns, from explicit non‐linguistic perceptual information, or from both. (shrink)

Given that Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) account integrates language production and comprehension, it is reasonable to ask whether it is compatible with embodied cognition. I argue that its dependence on rich intermediate representations of linguistic structure excludes embodiment. Two options are available to supporters of embodied cognition: They can adopt a more liberal notion of embodiment or they can attempt to replace these intermediate representations with robustly embodied ones. Both of these options face challenges.

The extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition and language are typically considered as rather independent perspectives. In this paper we propose a possible integration of the two views and support it proposing the idea of “Words As social Tools” (WAT). In this respect, we will propose that words, also due to their social and public character, can be conceived as quasi-external devices that extend our cognition. Moreover, words function like tools in that they enlarge the bodily space (...) of action thus modifying our sense of body. To support our proposal, we review the relevant literature on tool-use and on words as tools and report recent evidence indicating that word use leads to an extension of space close to the body. In addition, we outline a model of the neural processes that may underpin bodily space extension via word use and may reflect possible effects on cognition of the use of words as external means. We also discuss how reconciling the two perspectives can help to overcome the limitations they encounter if considered independently. (shrink)

Different languages carve the world in different categories. They also encode events in different ways, conventionalize different metaphorical mappings, and differ in their rule-based metonymies and patterns of meaning extensions. A long-standing, and controversial, question is whether this variability in the languages generates a corresponding variability in the conceptual structure of the speakers of those languages. Here we will present and discuss three interesting general proposals by focusing on representative authors of such proposals. The proposals are the following: first, that (...) the effect of language in conceptualization is general and deep; second, that the effect is local, transient, shallow and easily revisable; and third, that there is no proper effect of language on conceptualization, although there is surely some cognitive impact of language: many conceptual tasks engage language one way or another. (shrink)