Gilles fauconnier biography of william

The International Cognitive Linguistics Association mourns the loss of a founding member of our community, Gilles Fauconnier, who died on February 3, 2021. Gilles was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego.

He was perhaps best known to the ICLA community at large as the discoverer of mental spaces (as he always said, "Not the inventor - they were there all along!") and the developer of Mental Spaces Theory.His work on logic in natural language, reference, negation, conditionals, and on metaphor and conceptual blending, has had a profound impact on the fields of linguistics and cognitive science.

Fauconnier started his academic training with an engineering degree in Math and Physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1965, followed by a D.E.A. in mathematical logic and the algebra of categories from the University of Paris in 1967, a Ph.D.

in Linguistics from UCSD in 1971,