This book focuses on the connection between action and verbal communication, exploring topics such as the mechanisms of language processing, action processing, voluntary and involuntary actions, knowledge of language and assertion. Communication modelling and aspects of communicative actions are considered, along with cognitive requirements for nonverbal and verbal communicative action.

Contributions from expert authors are organised into three parts in this book, focussing on language in communication, action and bodily awareness, and sensorimotor interaction and language acquisition.

Readers will discover various methods that have been employed in investigations presented here, including neurological experiment, computational modeling, and logical and philosophical analysis.

These diverse expert perspectives shed light on the extent to which a mechanism for processing actions also facilitates the processing of language, and the authors' work prompts further interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between language and action.

This book is written for readers from different academic backgrounds; from graduate students to established academics in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology, philosophy, linguistics and beyond.

Earlier versions of the selected essays in this book were presented at the 2013 IEAS Conference on Language and Action, held in Taipei, Taiwan.

Autorentext

Tzu-Wei Hung is an assistant research fellow and a project coordinator at the Institute of European and American Studies at the Academia Sincia, the highest academic institution in Taiwan. He received his PhD from Kings College London in 2011 for a dissertation on the relation between the shared circuits model and language processing supervised by Shalom Lappin and Jim Hopkins. His work primarily focuses on the questions of how, and to what extent, the mechanism of action imitation can also describe sentence imitation. His honors include the Taiwan Merit Scholarship, National Science Council and the Academia Sinica Fellowships for Doctoral Candidates in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Inhalt
Preface.- Part 1: Language in Communication.- Chapter 1: Names, Descriptions and Assertion.- Chapter 2: Indefinites in Action.- Chapter 3: A Defense of the Knowledge Account of Assertion: From a Model-theoretic Perspective.- Part 2: Action and Bodily Awareness.- Chapter 4: When Actions Feel Alien.- Chapter 5: Self-Consciousness and its Linguistic Expression.- Chapter 6: Personal and Sub-Personal: Overcoming Explanatory Apartheid.- Part 3: Sensorimotor Interaction and Language Acquisition.- Chapter 7: How Infants Learn Word Meanings and Propositional Attitudes: A Neural Network Model.- Chapter 8: What Action Comprehension Tells Us about Meaning Interpretation.