George Lakoff at the 15th EAPC Conference
George Lakoff has confirmed his participation as speaker at the 15th EAPC Conference in Vienna, Austria, under the main topic "Emotions in Politics and Campaigning"
His current research covers many areas of Conceptual Analysis within Cognitive Linguistics: (i) The nature of human conceptual systems, especially metaphor systems for concepts such as time, events, causation, emotions, morality, the self, politics, etc. This also includes the study of such systems in other languages and their manifestations in linguistic form; (ii) The development of Cognitive Social Science, which applies ideas of Cognitive Semantics to the Social Sciences. It includes practical applications of cognitive linguistics to help social advocates reframe social and political issues; (iii) The implications of Cognitive Science for Philosophy, in collaboration with Mark Johnson, Chair of Philosophy at the University of Oregon; (iv) The cognitive structure, especially the metaphorical structure, of mathematics, in collaboration with Rafael Núñez of UC San Diego, Department of Cognitive Science; (v) Neural foundations of conceptual systems and language, in collaboration with Jerome Feldman, of the International Computer Science Institute, seeking to develop biologically-motivated structured connectionist systems to model both the learning of conceptual systems and their neural representations. This includes the development of a neural theory of grammar — embodied construction grammar — which precisely characterizes grammars in a notation suitable for both reduction to structured connectionist models and use in natural language processing.
