The concept of language is an elusive one, and the concept of mind even more so. Still the relation between them is of current interest in many quarters. The purpose of the Nobel Symposium on language and mind was to establish a forum for the discussion of this fundamental relation in a creative perspective. Representatives of several fields of knowledge, arts, and research gathered in an interdisciplinary setting, focusing on five aspects: literature, general linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurology, and artificial intelligence.

Analogy is the core of all thinking. This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize -- winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition. We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain's job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories. Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, "I undressed the banana!"? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, "Exactly the same thing happened to me!" when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend's remark triggers the offhand reply, "That's just sour grapes"? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea? The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making -- the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights. Like Gö, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core -- the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences -- this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.

Reading Science looks at the distinctive language of science and technology and the role it plays in building up scientific understandings of the world. It brings together discourse analysis and critical theory for the first time in a single volume. This edited collection examines science discourse from a number of perspectives, drawing on new rhetoric, functional linguistics and critical theory. It explores this language in research and industrial contexts as well as in educational settings and in popular science writing and science fiction. The papers also include consideration of the role of images (tables and figures) in science writing and the importance of reading science discourse as multi-modal text. The internationally renowned contributors include M. A. K. Halliday, Charles Bazerman and Jay Lemke.

This volume focuses on the relation between theory and description by examining aspects of transitivity in different languages. Transitivity — or case grammar, to use the popular term — has always occupied a centre-stage position in linguistics, not least because of its supposedly privileged relation to states of affairs in the real world. Using a systemic functional perspective, the ten papers in this volume make a contribution to this scholarship by focusing on the transitivity patterns in language as the expression of the experiential metafunction. Through a study of different languages — English, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese and Pitjantjatjara — the contributors provide functional descriptions of the various categories of process, their participants and circumstances, including phenomena such as di-transitivity, causativity, the get-passive, etc. With the relation between theories and descriptions running through the ten chapters of this volume as sometimes an overt and sometimes a covert theme, the chapters point to the nature of the linguistic fact which is linked ineluctably on the one hand to the nature of the theory and on the other to the speakers’ experience of the world in which they live. The majority of papers included in the volume derive from the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.

This work comprises a collection of the writings of Ruqaiya Hasan, an influential figure in the systemic functional linguistic learning school. It discusses the relation between text and context and the realization of context in language; the 'network', which is outlined as analytic tool which can be applied at two strata of language, the lexico-grammatical and the semantic; as well as aspects of the social structure that are implicated in the way cultures and subcultures express themselves.

This book presents a unique range of interdisciplinary work on questions of language development and evolution.It makes visible the significant contribution which meaning-oriented linguistics is making to debates about the origins of language - from the perspective of language evolution in the species as well as language development in the child. As well as linguistics in the systemic functional, or Hallidayan, tradition, the book offers contributions from primatology, psychiatry, sociology and education.