New Book Explains Meaning of Language and How It Excites Our Innermost Passions

– ‘The Crucible of Language’ Explains What We Know, and What We Do, When We Communicate Language –

NEW YORK, N.Y. – December 7, 2015 – Language and meaning are one of the great unsolved mysteries of the human mind. And in our everyday lives how we use language - to express ideas, make requests, ask a favour or to show anger, love or dismay – and for what purpose, is key to our survival.

In ‘The Crucible of Language: How the Language and the Mind Create Meaning,’ available January 2016 in paperback from Cambridge University Press, Vyvyan Evans throws fresh light on how linguistic meaning arises, where it comes from and the intriguing ways in which language can move us to tears, bore us to death, make us dizzy with delight or tingle with anticipation.

Evans explains what we know, and what we do, where it comes from, and the way language enables us to convey the meanings that can move us to tears, bore us to death, or make us dizzy with delight.

Meaning is, he argues, one of the final frontiers in the mapping of the human mind.

Overturning many popular views about the mechanisms that underpin mind design, the semantic basis of grammar and the evolutionary origins and precursors of language, Evans uses cutting-edge research to show how meaning arises from the confluence of language and the mind and how both are key to the way we use language to communicate and to convey meaning.

Advance Praise for The Crucible of Language“Evans has reclaimed language from the dry dissection of grammatical structure and returned it to the public as a topic to think deeply about.” 
-Alun Anderson, New Scientist

Evans’s book, ‘The Crucible of Language: How the Language and the Mind Create Meaning,’ an original paperback ($29.99 US) is available January 2016. 375 pages. The book contains 51 black & white illustrations and 11 tables.[ISBN:9781107561038].

About the authorVyvyan Evans is Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, where he has served as Head of the School of Linguistics and English Language and Deputy Head of the College of Arts and Humanities. His research relates to Cognitive Linguistics, an approach to language and mind which places central importance on meaning, the role of cognition and the embodiment of experience. He specialises in cognitive semantics, particularly knowledge representation, lexical structure, the relationship between lexical structure and knowledge representation, and figurative language and abstract thought. His research has focused on investigating spatial and temporal language and cognition, and the nature of the linguistic and conceptual resources that we as humans marshal in service of meaning construction.

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