Overview

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.

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9789004449510

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Michael Fortescue, Ph.D. Edinburgh University (1978), is professor emeritus in Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen. He published widely in Arctic languages, including West Greenlandic (Croom Helm, 1984) and (co-authored) The Comparative Eskimo Dictionary(Alaska Native Language Center, 2010). And within cognitive studies: The Abstraction Engine (Benjamins 2017).

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