Ten Lectures on Language, Culture and Mind

Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents an overview of topics ranging from language in children’s play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism. The intertwining of the evolutionary and individual time scales of human development is a key theme unifying the lectures, as is the fundamentally cultural nature of language and cognition. Familiar topics in cognitive linguistics, such as spatial semantics and conceptual blending, are addressed from these cultural, comparative and developmental perspectives. Chris Sinha also discusses the psychological roots of key concepts in cognitive linguistics, and sets out a biocultural approach to language evolution.