| Recent cognitive scientific research in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology shows that knowledge is structured according to the ways in which humans experience reality. The resulting notion of the embodied mind marks a radical shift from conventional theories of knowledge in which meaning is supposed to be the result of symbolic and propositional logic. Converging evidence from many fields supports the alternative idea that the wide variety of meaning is constructed systematically through a small repertoire of cognitive operations including conceptual metaphor, metonymy, categorization, framing, and conceptual blending. Models of mental-space theory demonstrate how communication occurs through behavior that prompts these cognitive operations.; Studies of musical meaning benefit from these developments. Cognitivism offers a disciplined approach to the topic long thought to be too idiosyncratic and subjective to be systematically accounted for. This dissertation adapts interdisciplinary work of linguists (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and Gilles Fauconnier), psychologists (Lawrence Barsalou and Lawrence Marks), and anthropologists (Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn) to show how meaning arises when music prompts the same repertoire of cognitive operations. This adaptation suggests that music takes unique advantage of the properties of sound to structure meaningful knowledge, thereby promising to illuminate, from a musical perspective, the workings of the mind. |
