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This chapter discusses listen‐class verbs and hear‐class verbs in terms of the claim that one of the building blocks of conceptual or cognitive semantics is the spatial organisation of meaning. It also explores these verbs in terms of force dynamics and theories of agency. Related to these two areas of concern, the chapter investigates the semantic and lexical relationships between the two classes of verb and also discusses their Aktionsarten. One of the claims is that the senses of agentive look and see instantiate the same concept.

Chapter 5, “Toward a force-dynamic theory of argument realization”, provides a critical survey of theories of the role of event structure in argument realization, concluding with the causal chain (force dynamic) model. Many prior theories have proposed a number of syntactic or semantic constructs in addition to causal-aspectual event structure in order to account for a wide range of argument realization patterns. These additional constructs can be replaced by using two properties of event structure: the causal transmission of force between participants, and the profiling of part of the causal chain (leaving the remainder as part of the causal semantic frame of the event). The chapter concludes by introducing the integration of the two geometric dimensions of the aspectual representation from chapters 2-4 and the causal chain. This is achieved by assigning each participant in the event its own aspectual subevent; the subevents are causally related to one another in the causal chain.

Causal cognition is characterized by a range of phenomena, including the distinction between cause and enable, transitivity, and causation by omission. Two major classes of causal theories—dependency theories and process theories—have had limited success explaining these phenomena. According to causal pluralism, the failure of these theories indicates that more than one theory is needed to account for the full range of phenomena associated with causal cognition. While combining theories allows us to account for a wide range of phenomena, this benefit comes at a cost: when theories overlap, their predictions usually conflict. This chapter shows how Talmy’s (1988) force-dynamic theory can be extended to handle causal chains. It is shown how one particular process account can handle the wide range of phenomena addressed in pluralist theories without internal inconsistency and, ultimately, how such a theory may offer a single, unified theory of causation.

This chapter presents the career of James J. Heckman as an economist and examines how he became a Nobel Prize awardee. Heckman was born in 1944 and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He was appointed professor of economics in 1977 and later served as a distinguished service professor of economics at the University of Chicago. His philosophy was that economics is useful only if it helps to explain the economy and solve practical problems. He stressed the need for more rigorous empirical testing of economic models. His work covered a wide area that included labor supply, affirmative action, pricing of labor services, labor force dynamics, and regulation and deregulation in Europe and Latin America. His research in these areas drew him to new theories and new econometrics. His works include Longitudinal Analysis of Labor Market Data and Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?

Force dynamics have long played a significant role in cognitive approaches to linguistic semantics. The chapter proposes that the arguments discovered by Davidson refer to forces instead of to events. A force, conceptually, is energy input into a situation. Formally, the chapter treats forces as functions from an initial situation to the situation that results ceteris paribus. The key feature of the approach is that it allows a simple semantic characterization of a ‘normal’ result that does not entail the existence of that result; in standard event-based treatments, in contrast, possible words or partial events are needed to defeat this entailment in cases where the result does not occur; the adoption of possible worlds over-complicates the semantics while the use of partial events glosses over the issue of how to link causes and results. The chapter illustrates the framework with a detailed analysis of the frustrative morpheme cem in Tohono O’odham.

Schemata acquire affective value through force dynamics at the deepest level of cognition. Affect is a transitive activity between the self as agonist and an “other” as antagonist that arises from sensory, motor, or emotive factors. In poetry, affect results primarily from a poem’s sonic and structural prosody to create the impression or “illusion” of virtual life. The affect respondents feel isn’t something static “in” the poem but a dynamic response to the poet’s intensions and motivations. Missing a poem’s affective tone can lead to misreading its emotive import and misevaluating the poet’s intension, as the discussion shows in a poem by Thomas Hardy. It also shows how the force dynamics of the FEAR schema in a Wallace Stevens poem creates an icon of danger confronting the self’s homeostasis. The chapter ends by summarizing the aspects of affective schemata that can lead to a theory of a model of affect in poetry and life.

This chapter provides an introduction to the volume and to the topics discussed in later chapters. These topics include, in the first part of the book, theories of causation, formal semantics for causal constructions, force dynamics, and modality and causation. The second half of the book looks at issues such as the syntax–semantics interface, causativization and event structure, inadvertent cause, and event-structural prominence and forces in verb meaning shifts. Data are drawn from a range of languages including Vietnamese, Hindi, and Tohono O’odham.

This article analyses the metaphor of “battle against oneself” in the monastic textbook Unseen Warfare, which provides advice for the spiritual advancement of Orthodox Christians, saying the path of the good life consists in renunciation of worldly desires, thoughts, and actions, depicted as a battle that the monk must wage against himself. In terms of cognitive science, the change of focus of attention (from outside towards inside) may be taken as another indicator of the shift in how humans perceive morality—from external norms towards inner motivation. This can be interpreted as another unrecognized wave of double-scope blending in the early Christian period. Finally, the linguistic analysis and the hypothesis in cognitive science may be grounded in the claim of some Orthodox theologians that finding an ‘antagonist’ is an ontological human need, which is best resolved, and leads to salvation, if one gradually learns to find the object of the struggle not outside, but within oneself.