The Crucible of Language - How Language and Mind Create Meaning - Grand Format

From the barbed, childish taunt on the school playground, to the eloquent sophistry of a lawyer prising open a legal loophole in a court of law, meaning arises each time we use language to communicate with one another. How we use language - to convey ideas, make requests, ask a favour, express anger, love, dismay - is of the utmost importance ; indeed, linguistic meaning can be a matter of life and death.
And yet, until relatively recently, the communicative value of language was all but relegated to the margins of scientific enquiry. In The Crucible of Language, Vyvyan Evans explains what we know, and what we do when we communicate using language ; he shows how linguistic meaning arises where it cornes from, and the way language enables us to convey the meanings that can move us to tears, bore us to death or make us dizzy with delight.
Meaning is, he argues, one of the final frontiers in the mapping of the human mind.