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Conceptual structure is embodied

Seminar 2

COGNITIVE SEMANTICS

A cognitive semantics approach.

Guiding principles of cognitive semantics.

Conceptual structure is embodied.

Semantic structure is conceptual structure.

Meaning representation is encyclopaedic.

Meaning construction is conceptualization

 

PRINCIPLES OF CATEGORIZATION

Prototype theory (E.Rosh).

The theory of idealized cognitive models (G.Lakoff).

Sources of typicality effects

the simplest type of typicality effects;

typicality effects due to cluster models;

typicality effects due to metonymy;

radial categories as a further source of typicality effects.

 

 

LECTURE 4.

COGNITIVE SEMANTICS

Cognitive semantics began in the 1970s as a reaction against the objectivist world-viewassumed by the Anglo-American tradition in philosophy and the related approach, truth-conditional semantics, developed within formal linguistics. Eve Sweetser, a leading cognitive linguist, describes the truth conditional approach in the following terms: ‘By viewing meaning as the relationship between words and the world, truth-conditional semantics eliminates cognitive organization from the linguistic system’ (Sweetser 1990: 4).

In contrast to this view, cognitive semantics sees linguistic meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure:the nature and organisation of mental representation in all its richness and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning.

Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: ‘Research on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language’ (Talmy 2000: 4).Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics of which it is a part, is not a single unified framework. Those researchers who identify themselves as cognitive semanticists typically have a diverse set of foci and interests. However, there are a number of principles that collectively characterise a cognitive semantics approach.

Guiding principles

1. Conceptual structure is embodied (the ‘embodied cognition thesis’).

2. Semantic structure is conceptual structure.

3. Meaning representation is encyclopaedic.

4. Meaning construction is conceptualisation.

These principles can be viewed as outcomes of the two key commitments described.

Conceptual structure is embodied

A fundamental concern for cognitive semanticists is the nature of the relationship between conceptual structure and the external world of sensory experience. In other words, cognitive semanticists set out to explore the nature of human interaction with and awareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is consonant with the ways in which we experience the world. One idea that has emerged in an attempt to explain the nature of conceptual organisation on the basis of interaction with the physical world is the embodied cognition thesis. As we saw, this thesis holds that the nature of conceptual organisation arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated.




Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1611


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