Full Description
Verbs of mental states or activity constitute a subject of considerable interest to both Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. They promise to open a window on the invisible workings of the mind, while at the same time displaying a wide variety of historical sources across languages. In this book Michael Fortescue presents an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world's languages. The relationship among the cognitive verbs of individual languages is essentially one of metonymy, and the book investigates in detail the specific metonymic relationships involved, as revealed largely by the polysemous spread of word meanings. The data is projected against a circular 'map' of interrelated cognitive categories.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
1 Introduction
2 Thinking in General
3 Understanding
4 Knowing
5 Believing
6 Remembering
7 Thinking about
8 Judging (Considering)
9 Calculating
10 Deciding
11 Guessing
12 Intending
13 Imagining
14 Expecting
15 Wishing
16 Emotional Feelings
17 Surprise
18 Experiencing (Feeling)
19 Perceiving (Noticing)
20 Recognizing
21 Full Circle
22 What a Surprise! A Closer Look at a Cinderella Category
23 The Cross-Linguistic Expression of Categories of Emotion
24 Seeming: An Odd One Out?
25 Guess: How a Single Category Can Involve All Others
26 Conclusions
Sources for Languages Cited
Appendix 1: A Sentimental Circle
Appendix 2: Raw Lexical Data
References
Index
