Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science, contents (2005)

Unlike The Poetics of Mind (1995), Gibbs' new book not only discusses psycholinguistics, but also perception and other linguistic phenomena. However, chapters 4 and 6 still focus on cognitive metaphor theory as such, and they largely reiterate the claims he has made elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the new book, like the old one, still has a mostly flat structure, more in the style of a laundry list than a narrative. Since I find this a little difficult to find my way around in, I'll just quickly give a table of contents for the two chapters.

Chapter 4: Concepts

The contents of chapter 2 (pp. 79–122) are as follows:

1. Untitled introduction (pp. 79–80)
2. Traditional Views of Concepts (pp. 80–81)
3. Problems with the Traditional View (pp. 81–86)
4. Perceptual Symbols (pp. 86–90)
5. Image Schemas and the Metaphorical Nature of Abstract Concepts (pp. 90–96)
6. Thinking (pp. 96–99)
7. Linguistic Action (pp. 99–104)
8. Grammar and Spatial Concepts (pp. 104–107)
9. Political Ideas (pp. 107–111)
10. Mathematical Concepts (pp. 111–114)
11. Questions about Image Schemas (pp. 114–115)
12. Questions about Conceptual Metaphors (pp. 115–116)
13. A New View of Embodied Metaphor (pp. 116–118)
14. Is Cognitive Linguistic Evidence Relevant to the Study of Cognition? (pp. 118–121)
15. Conclusion (pp. 121–122)

Sections 6 through 10 (pp. 96–114) contain various linguistic illustrations of the notion of an schema. The headings "Thinking" and "Linguistic Action" could thus also have been named "English words words for thought-related concepts" and "English words for speech-related concepts."

All three chapters are extremely speculative, and they rely almost solely on introspection and post-hoc rationalization of linguistic expressions.

Chapter 6: Language and Communication

Chapter 6 (pp. 158–207) contains the following subheadings:

1. Untitled introduction (pp. 158–159)
2. Time Course of Linguistic Communication (pp. 159–160)
3. Language Change (pp. 160–161)
4. Speech Perception (pp. 161–165)
5. Gesture and Speech (pp. 165–170)
6. Body Movement and Discourse (pp. 170–174)
7. Word Meaning (pp. 174–180)
8. Image Schemas and Utterance Interpretation (pp. 180–183)
9. Embodied action in Metaphor Processing (pp. 183–184)
10. Desire as Hunger: A Case Study in Embodied Metaphor (pp. 184–187)
11. Understanding Time Expressions (pp. 187–190)
12. Embodied Metaphors in American Sign Language (pp. 190–194)
13. Neural Theory of Language (pp. 194–198)
14. Embodied Construction Grammar (pp. 198–199)
15. Embodied Text Understanding (pp. 199–205)
16. A Case Study: Indexical Hypotheticals (pp. 205–207)
17. Conclusion (p. 207)

Section 2 is a warning not to confuse diachronic and synchronic issues. Section 3 is a discussion of etymology with a reference to Eve Sweetser.

Section 10 is about the desire/hunger study that I have read, but been unable to obtain the data from. Section 13 is a discussion of Narayanan's seriously inadequate computation model of verb comprehension.