Daniel Casasanto: The Ad Hoc Construction of Meaning

Explore a 35-minute lecture by Daniel Casasanto, Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Cornell University, on the ad hoc construction of meaning. Delve into topics such as Plato's Aviary, ad hoc concepts and categories, the ubiquity of nonce sense, and the Body-Specificity Hypothesis. Examine how action verbs activate somatotopic regions of the brain and how word meaning depends on the language user's body. Investigate the motor component of action verb understanding and the creation of meaning in indirect requests. Gain insights into the ad hoc use of scientific constructs and the role of context in cognitive linguistics.

Intro
The Ad Hoc Construction of Meaning
What's in our minds? Plato's Aviary
Ad Hoc CC&Ms
Words have meanings
Responses to Ad Hoc Cognition (AHC)
The plan
Like William James sai...
Some Categories are Ad Hoc
Some Concepts are Ad Hoc
Some parts of word meanings are ad ho
"the ubiquity of nonce sense" "He tried to teapot a policeman" (Clark, 1983)
The unboundedness of nonce sense
Semantic representations beyond the "core" language network
Action verbs activate somatotopic regions of (pre)motor cortex
Action words activate left-hemisphere circuits involved action observation and action execution.
The Body-Specificity Hypothesis
Does word meaning depend on the specifics of the language user's body?
The motor component of action verb understanding is body-specific.
Changing the syntactic context
OTHERS' ACTIONS (HE/SHE THROWS)
Creating meaning of indirect requests activates Motor, Theory of Mind areas
The ad hoc use of scientific constructs
CC&Ms in context