Spaces, domains, and meaning

Cognitive Semiotics is a new discipline dedicated to the analysis of meaning. It combines cognitive linguistics and semantics with structural and dynamic semiotics, and seeks to elaborate a coherent framework for the study of language and thought, gesture and culture, discourse and text, art and symbolization in general. The essays of this book develop a semiotic elaboration of the theory of mental spaces, a grounding hypothesis of semantic domains, and the methodologically necessary idea of a mental architecture corresponding to the neural organization of our brain, and compatible with the basic facts of human phenomenology. This volume presents the author's recent research, carried out at the Aarhus center, where American and European approaches to language-based semantics have been meeting for a particularly inspiring decade.