Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language (Bradford Books) - Hardcover

"Gilles Fauconnier's "Mental Spaces" is a magnificent piece of work. Fauconnier has shown that mental spaces succeed where possible world semantics and situation semantics have failed. He has taken three of the most difficult and vexing problems in natural language semantics - referential opacity, the referential-attributive distinction, and the projection problem for presuppositions - and provided a uniform solution for all of them. What is most impressive is that the solution is simple, intuitive, and plausible."- George Lakoff, University of California, Berkeley.

This book offers a highly original, integrated treatment of issues that play a central role in linguistic semantics, philosophy of language, and cognitive approaches to meaning.It is based on the idea that expressions of language are not interpreted directly via truth conditions; rather, at a certain cognitive level they help to build up mental spaces, internally structured and linked to one another. Because the construction of spaces is typically underdetermined by the expressions, simple principles yield multiple possibilities and apparently complex ambiguities.Focusing on the mental constructions that can be associated with expressions rather than merely on the expressions themselves, Fauconnier reveals a general, uniform, and elegant organization that is responsible for superficially diverse and complex phenomena. A finding that challenges several traditional and widespread views on meaning and natural language, with far-reaching implications: adequate theories of truth and reference cannot bypass the cognitive space-construction process, and standard linguistic arguments for hidden structural levels are invalidated.Gilles Fauconnier is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris VIII.A Bradford Book.