Meanings as conceptual structures (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Pragmatics, 2006
Leonard Talmy is a leading light of cognitive linguistics, known especially for his work in cognitive semantics, an approach to linguistics that aims to describe the linguistic representation of conceptual structure. The two-volume set ''Toward a Cognitive Semantics'' is a collection of 16 of Talmy's papers spanning roughly 30 years of his thinking and writing. The papers have been updated, expanded, revised, and arranged by concept into chapters. This review of the volumes is tailored to a non-specialist linguist or cognitive scientist interested in a general orientation to the contents and presentation. In the introduction common to the two books, Talmy situates cognitive linguistics within the discipline of linguistics and identifies his primary methodology as introspection. The ''overlapping systems model'' of cognitive organization is outlined, in which cognitive systems, such as language, vision, kinesthetics, and reasoning can and do interact. Talmy proposes ''the general finding that each system has certain structural properties that are uniquely its own, certain structural properties that it shares with only one or a few other systems, and certain structural properties that it shares with most or all the other systems. These last properties would constitute the most fundamental properties of conceptual structuring in human cognition.'' The reader is guided to specific chapters in which the linguistic system is compared to other cognitive systems of visual perception, kinesthetic perception, attention, understanding/reasoning, pattern integration, cognitive culture, and affect. Each volume of the set is about 500 pages long, with eight chapters organized into three or four major sections. The first volume, ''Concept structuring systems'' expounds Talmy's vision of the fundamental systems of conceptual structuring in language. Part 1 presents a theoretical orientation, Part 2 addresses configurational structure, Part 3 discusses the distribution of attention, and Part 4 describes force dynamics. The second volume, ''Typology and process in concept structuring,'' turns from conceptual systems themselves to the processes that structure concepts and the typologies that emerge from these. Part 1 looks at the processes on a long-term scale, longer than an individual's lifetime, that deal with the representation of event structure. Part 2 considers the short-term scale of cognitive processing with a look at online processing, and Part 3 addresses medium-term processes in the acquisition of culture and the processing of narrative. In volume 1, Chapter 1, ''The relation of grammar to cognition,'' is a greatly revised and expanded version of a 1988 paper, itself an expansion of papers from 1977 and 1978. This paper details the ''semantics of grammar'' in language, toward the larger goal of determining the character of conceptual structure in general. Talmy proposes that the fundamental design feature www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Conceptual semantics and cognitive linguistics
Cognitive Linguistics, 1996
Page 1. 1 Conceptual semantics and cognitive linguistics by Ray Jackendoff Published in Cognitive Linguistics 7-1 (1996), 93-129 © Walter de Gruyter Overwiew 1) Ideology 1) Syntax 1) Conceptual Structure 1) Notation 1) Polysemy Page 2. 2 1) Ideology ...
Semantics and Cognition: An Introduction
Journal Language and Linguistics, 2003
Langackerians and Chomskyites alike would probably agree that the purpose of linguistic analysis is to explicate the mental representations and processes resulting in linguistic behavior, and so a fundamental issue of current linguistic theory is the cognitive processing of meaning. The intersection of semantics and cognition has developed along at least four lines: (1) Meaning is equivalent to conceptualization, schematically and structurally represented in the human mind; (2) the meanings of clauses or sentences are essentially based on the semantic properties of predicates with reference to their argument roles; (3) phrasal constructions carry independent meanings which interact with the meanings of verbs in non-trivial ways; (4) interpretation of meaning does not rely solely on semantic structure, but is crucially ascribed to pragmatic factors (such as discourse manipulation or talk-in-interaction). The discussion that follows will sketch out these four approaches.
Conceptualist semantics: explanatory power, scope and uniqueness
A familiar assumption in much linguistic semantics is that meanings are to be identified conceptually as, or as subparts of, the conceptual representations deployed in general cognitive processes. However, this assumption has increasingly come into question as a result of developments in the study of cognition both within and outside linguistics. This article reassesses the place of concept-based explanation in semantics in light of these developments, concentrating on the explanatory power, scope and uniqueness of the conceptual hypothesis as a substantive proposal about the mental architecture supporting meaning. It concludes that while concept-based explanations of meaning are viable for a certain class of referents, their role in a cognitively natural account of the lexicon is subject to significant but little appreciated limitations.