Semantic structure is conceptual structure

This principle asserts that language refers to concepts in the mind of the speaker rather than to objects in the external world. In other words, semantic structure (the meanings conventionally associated with words and other linguistic units) can be equated with concepts. These conventional meanings associated with words are linguistic conceptsor lexical concepts: the conventional form that conceptual structure requires in order to be encoded in language.

However, the claim that semantic structure can be equated with conceptual structure does not mean that the two are identical. Instead, cognitive semanticists claim that the meanings associated with words, for example, form only a subset of possible concepts. After all, we have many more thoughts, ideas and feelings than we can conventionally encode in language. For example, we have a concept for the place on our faces below our nose and above our mouth where moustaches go. We must have a concept for this part of the face in order to understand that the hair that grows there is called a moustache. However, as Langacker (1987) points out, there is no English word that conventionally encodes this concept (at least not in the non-specialist vocabulary of everyday language).

It follows that the set of lexical concepts is only a subset of the entire set of concepts in the mind of the speaker. For a theory of language, this principle is of greater significance than we might think. Recall that semantic structure relates not just to words but to all linguistic units.A linguistic unit might be a word like cat, a bound morphemesuch as -er, as in driver or teacher, or indeed a larger conventional pattern, like the structure of an active sentence or a passive sentence.

One of the properties that makes cognitive semantics different from other approaches to language, then, is that it seeks to provide a unified account of lexical and grammatical organisation rather than viewing these as distinct subsystems.

It is important to point out that cognitive semanticists are not claiming that language relates to concepts internal to the mind of the speaker and nothing else. This would lead to an extreme form of subjectivism, in which concepts are divorced from the world that they relate to (see Sinha 1999). Indeed, we have concepts in the first place either because they are useful ways of understanding the external world, or because they are inevitable ways of understanding the world, given our cognitive architecture and our physiology. Cognitive semantics therefore steers a path between the opposing extremes of subjectivism and the objectivism encapsulated in traditional truth-conditional semantics by claiming that concepts relate to lived experience.

Semantic structure

Linguistic expressions refer to entities or describe situations or scenes. Entities and scenes can be relatively concrete objects or events, or they can relate to more subjective experiences, such as feeling remorse or joy or experiencing unrequited love. According to Talmy, the way language conveys entities and scenes is by reflecting or encoding the language user’s Cognitive Representation (CR)or conceptual system. In other words, although the conceptual system is not open to direct investigation, the properties of language allow us to reconstruct the properties of the conceptual system and to build a model of that system that, among other things, explains the observable properties of language.

Talmy suggests that the CR, as manifested in language, is made up of two systems, each of which brings equally important but very different dimensions to the scene that they construct together. These systems are the conceptual structuring systemand the conceptual content system. While the conceptual structuring system, as its name suggests, provides the structure, skeleton or ‘scaffolding’ for a given scene, the content system provides the majority of rich substantive detail. It follows from this view that the meaning associated with the conceptual structuring system is highly schematic in nature, while the meaning associated with the conceptual content system is rich and highly detailed.

This distinction is captured in Figure 1.

It is important to emphasise that the system represented in Figure 1 relates to the conceptual system as it is encoded in semantic structure. In other words, semantic structure represents the conventional means of encoding conceptual structure for expression in language. The bifurcation shown in Figure 1reflects the way language conventionally encodes the conceptual structure that humans externalise in language. Nevertheless, we reiterate a point here that while lexical concepts are conceptual in nature, in the sense that they prompt for conceptual structures of various kinds, the range of lexical concepts conventionally encoded in language must represent only a small fraction of the range and complexity of conceptual structure in the mind of any given human being.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1983