Preliminary Program Posted

The CSDL Conference schedule is available here You can also view plenary and workshops abstracts here or by clicking on the “View abstract” links on the program page.

Creativity across modalities in viewpoint-construction

Eve Sweetser  (University of California, Berkeley) Thursday, May 17th Buchanan A104 Because cognition and language are based in human embodied experience, which is essentially viewpointed, human representations are pervaded by viewpoint. Within the frameworks of mental spaces and conceptual blending, I will discuss some of the ways in which complex viewpoint is creatively built in […]

From Embodied Perspective to Grammar in American Sign Language

Terry Janzen (University of Manitoba)   Friday, May 18th  To say that language is embodied means that the structure of language is shaped to some extent by our bodily experience of interacting with our environment. Important in this conceptualization of the world and of our language use (because we also conceptualize the link between ideas […]

Experiential Relativity

Daniel Casasanto  (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics/New School for Social Research) Saturday, May 19th  People are not all the same.  There is astonishing diversity among human cultures, languages, and bodies.  How is the diversity of the human experience reflected in the mind?  In this talk, I will review research into the mechanisms and the consequences […]

Types of speech and thought representation in narrative within and across languages – a constructional approach

Arie Verhagen  (Leiden University) Sunday, May 20th  The (re)presentation of different perspectives (subjects of consciousness and the contents of their minds) is crucial to the interpretation and coherence of (narrative) discourse, both fictional and non-fictional (e.g. certain types of journalistic texts). Important traditional distinctions in this regard are those between direct, indirect, and free indirect […]

Language, gesture, and audiovisual communication: a massive online database for researching multimodal constructions

David DeLiema (UCLA), Francis Steen (UCLA), and Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University) Sunday, May 20th  We propose to extend cognitive linguistics in two ways: (1) to the study of multimodal constructions, and (2) to the study of amounts of data so massive as to be intractable absent powerful computational and statistical methods.  As part […]

Minding the News

Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University)   Thursday, May 17th  Although we think of TV network news as sober reporting of events—”the latest facts”— a viewer’s understanding of the news is actually the result of elaborate and highly creative cognitive construction of meaning in response to minimal cues.  This talk will analyze the nature of some […]

Cognitive poetics for linguists

Peter Stockwell  (Nottingham University) Thursday, May 17th  The development of cognitive poetics as a form of application of cognitive science to literary scholarship has emerged as an interdisciplinary field, with research and methods drawn from neuroscience and evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. For the most part, the direction of influence has been one-way, […]

The dynamics of embodied ‘experiential conceptualizations’. How bodily experiences ground the emergence and elaboration of multimodal metaphor in a ballet lesson

Cornelia Müller (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)) Friday, May 18th Buchanan A201  The paper investigates the emergence and interactive elaboration of metaphoric meaning in ballet training. It explores how bodily experiences serve as a source for the emergence of a multimodal metaphor, how the metaphor established by the teacher makes its way through the entire […]

Creativity in language is achieved through simulation

Teenie Matlock (University of California, Merced)  Thursday, May 17th 2:30pm-3:30pm In the late 1990s Barsalou (1999) and other cognitive psychologists argued that grammar plays a role in constraining mental simulation of states and actions in the communication of concepts. On this view, the meanings of grammatical elements are believed to impose constraints on conceptual content […]