George P. Lakoff (1941 - )
Related: embodied philosophy - metaphor - mind - linguistics - philosophy
Biography
George P. Lakoff (born 1941) is a professor of linguistics (in particular, cognitive linguistics) at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. He is particularly famous for his concept of the "embodied mind". In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, and founded a progressive think tank, the Rockridge Institute. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff [Dec 2005]
Metaphors We Live by (1980) - George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
Metaphors We Live by (1980) - George Lakoff, Mark Johnson [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of the metaphor. --Synopsis via Amazon.com
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) - George Lakoff
In search of image-schema.
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) - George Lakoff [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Connected to: Prototype Theory - Image schema - Dyirbal language - Construction grammar - Grammatical gender - List of animals (Borges) - Psycholinguistics - Metaphor - Framing (communication theory) - Cognitive rhetoric - Conceptual blending - Laws of Form --via here.
See also: categories
Image schema
Image schema is a recurring structure of, or within, our cognitive processes, which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. Image schemas emerge from our bodily interactions, linguistic experience and historical context. The term is explained in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind, in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking.
In contemporary cognitive linguistics, an image schema is considered an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings. Evidence for image schemas is drawn from a number of related disciplines, including work on cross-modal cognition in psychology, from spatial cognition in both linguistics and psychology, and from neuroscience. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_schema [Aug 2006]
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