Category: cognitive linguistics

• Two new books on metaphor

  Two recent books on metaphors worth looking at is Raymond Gibbs and Herbert Colston’s Interpreting Figurative Meaning and Benjamin K. Bergen’s Louder Than Words. Gibbs and Colston approaches metaphorical meaning from psycholinguistics and neuroscience while Bergen looks at meaning from the cutting-edge perspective of neuroimaging. Both are worth a look. The Gibbs/Colston is harder to…

  Warren Tang

  14 February 2013

• Tie Fighters and cultural unconsciousness

  I spend a lot of time thinking about language, even when buying presents for my kids. This year I got the Lego Tie Fighter for my son (deep down the toy is for me but I believe we have kids so that we can continue our childhood into adulthood). For most of my life I…

  Warren Tang

  25 December 2012

• Body language and changing your behaviour

  Body language is known to tell you a lot about a person. In a reversal in thinking Amy Cuddy in this TED presentation talks about how controlling or changing your body language can change your behaviour and frame of mind. Time for my big stretch … if you get what I mean.

  Warren Tang

  19 October 2012

• Aris Venetikidis on maps in the brain

  Here is a nice talk on how we map out our world in terms of getting from Point A to Point B. The key to making sense of things is simplification. Firstly, we represent getting somewhere by a series of landmarks. Secondly, no matter how windy a route is from two points our brains represent…

  Warren Tang

  8 October 2012

• Word Grammar

  Came across a new-ish theory today – Word Grammar. Its creator and champion is Richard (Dick) Hudson at UCL. Seems worth exploring as a theory. Considered a minor branch of cognitive linguistics.

  Warren Tang

  15 June 2012

• Teaching function words: the cognitive and corpus perspectives

  I will be giving a presentation on function words, what we can learn from corpora about them, how we understnad them in light of conceptual metaphor theory and what this all means for second language teaching. The venue and date: PanSIG @ Hiroshima University, 16 June 2012.

  Warren Tang

  8 June 2012

• The alphabet as object

  In a novel study of baboons it has been found it is possible for the animals to recognise ‘words’ (real word letter sequences) as opposed to jumbled letter sequences. This may indicate we may need to rethink our understanding of symbols as abstractions to a simpler concrete interpretation as if they are plain objects. I…

  Warren Tang

  16 April 2012

• Three things Tokyo University students have in common

  I was reminded by Stephen Krashen’s post on reading, access to books, and school performance about the three things Tokyo University students have that help them get into the University – bookshelves (with books of course, and the more the better), a globe (to help them see the world differently (or is it correctly)), and…

  Warren Tang

  10 January 2012

• Language and emotions are separate

  Do we really need language to have emotions? Given some thought it should be apparent that emotions – any sort of feeling – should not depend on language. Babies do not need to know the words ‘It hurts,’ to cry in pain. And we do not need the word ‘disgust’ to be disgusted. The role…

  Warren Tang

  4 November 2011