How Language Makes Meaning : Embodiment and Conjoined Antonymy

This book shows how language's key function is to enable human social interaction, a function that is motivated by powerful brain mechanisms. Written for researchers and graduate students, it provides a framework for observing how language operates and explains how the meaning-making components of language interact.

Language''s key function is to enable human social interaction, for which people are motivated to engage by powerful brain mechanisms. This book integrates recent work on embodied simulations, traditional meaning-making processes and a myriad of semantic and other meaning contributors to formulate a new model of how language functions following a pattern of conjoined antonymy. It investigates how embodied simulations,semantic information, deviation, omission, indirectness, figurativity, language play, and other processes leverage rich meaning from only a few words by using inherently biological, cognitive and social frameworks. The interaction of these meaning-making components of language is described and a language-functioning model based on recent neuroscientific research is laid out to allow for a more complete understanding of how language operates.