Mediating between Concepts and Grammar

Researchers with backgrounds in theoretical linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology have contributed to the interdisciplinary discussion of the interface between conceptual representations and linguistic structures. This book fills a critical gap in cognitive science. The study implements the objective of determining the impact that adjoining non-linguistic cognitive systems have on linguistic encoding, the mapping between representations, and the requirements of language processing. In this setting event conceptualization and verbalization is treated as one central phenomenon from the different interdisciplinary viewpoints. Theoretical analyses are confronted with psycholinguistic findings about the processing of event representations. Further empirical issues like the influence of visual perception on speech become apparent since we are primarily concerned with the overall architecture of the language processing system as an integral part of the cognitive endowment. Here, the lexicon is recognized as a mediator between linguistic and non-linguistic, semantic and syntactic components. The volume constitutes a major contribution to knowledge in the field and will be of value to an interdisciplinary audience.

Holden Haertl and Heike Tappe are Assistant Professors at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.