2013-12-05

The Conversation Frame as a Basic Domain in Human Cognition: An Introduction to the Communicative Mind

Line Brandt (Copenhagen Business School)

Based on an interdisciplinary research project in cognitive semiotics, the lecture presents a view of the mind as fundamentally attuned to social interaction and communication. In analytic philosophy, language is traditionally thought of as a truth-conditional system of symbols. Breaking with this tradition, cognitive linguistics has emphasized the significance of categorization, conceptualization and context when considering linguistic meaning. Intentionality and communication, however, are still not recognized as basic aspects of our embodied environment and are described (e.g. by George Lakoff) as being derived from our physical environment by metaphorical extension. My claim, by contrast, is that language is fundamentally shaped by intersubjective interaction, and that the conversation frame is in fact a basic domain in human experience. By way of illustration, we will focus on a selection of intersubjectivity phenomena from the first three chapters of my doctoral dissertation (2010, publ. 2013), starting with the shortest duration of verbal interaction and working our way up the time scale, by baby steps, to utterances and discourse.

Line Brandt, author of The Communicative Mind (2013), is an interdisciplinary scholar, lecturer, translator, and editor of literary and academic journals and books. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive semiotics and a joint Master's degree in philosophy and English. Her publications include translations of literature and literary theory, an introductory book on cognitive poetics, and academic papers on topics in cognitive linguistics and philosophy.