Language and Cognitive Structures of Emotion

Th is book set out with the idea of investigating the relationship between intensionality, language and the cognitive structures underlying emotive expressions in language. On the one hand, the linguistic properties of intensionality have a curious refl ex of mentality, especially when these properties are apprehended through the lens of intensionality’s manifestation in natural language. In intensional contexts a nominal term resists the substitution of itself for another term equivalent—formally or otherwise—to it, or a nominal term denoting an object refers to something non-existent in our world, or a quantifi cational nominal expression can have a non-specifi c reading. Some of the facets of intensionality (a reference to non-existent entities such as unicorns, or treating ‘the capital of Australia’ and ‘Canberra’ distinctly because one has distinct beliefs associated with each of the terms) are decidedly grounded in the machinery of our mental representations. All three properties in some combination or other are typically associated with intensionality.