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= Cognitive semantics =
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Introduction
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Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement.
Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics
holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability,
and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It
is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple
things and processes in the world differently (different cultures),
not necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world
and the real world (wrong beliefs).
The main tenets of cognitive semantics are:
* That grammar manifests a conception of the world held in a culture;
* That knowledge of language is acquired and contextual;
* That the ability to use language draws upon general cognitive
resources and not a special language module.
As part of the field of cognitive linguistics, the cognitive semantics
approach rejects the traditional separation of linguistics into
phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, etc. Instead, it divides
semantics into 'meaning-construction' and 'knowledge representation'.
Therefore, cognitive semantics studies much of the area traditionally
devoted to pragmatics as well as semantics.
The techniques native to cognitive semantics are typically used in
lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, George
Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts, and Bruce Wayne Hawkins. Some cognitive
semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Talmy, take into
account syntactic structures as well.
Points of contrast
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As a field, semantics is interested in three big questions: what does
it mean for units of language, called lexemes, to have "meaning"? What
does it mean for sentences to have meaning? Finally, how is it that
meaningful units fit together to compose complete sentences? These are
the main points of inquiry behind studies into lexical semantics,
structural semantics, and theories of compositionality (respectively).
In each category, traditional theories seem to be at odds with those
accounts provided by cognitive semanticists.
Classic theories in semantics (in the tradition of Alfred Tarski and
Donald Davidson) have tended to explain the meaning of parts in terms
of 'necessary and sufficient conditions', sentences in terms of
'truth-conditions', and composition in terms of 'propositional
functions'. Each of these positions is tightly related to the others.
According to these traditional theories, the meaning of a particular
sentence may be understood as the conditions under which the
proposition conveyed by the sentence hold true. For instance, the
expression "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is, in fact,
white. Lexical units can be understood as holding meaning either by
virtue of set of things they may apply to (called the "extension" of
the word), or in terms of the common properties that hold between
these things (called its "intension"). The intension provides an
interlocutor with the necessary and sufficient conditions that let a
thing qualify as a member of some lexical unit's extension. Roughly,
propositional functions are those abstract instructions that guide the
interpreter in taking the free variables in an open sentence and
filling them in, resulting in a correct understanding of the sentence
as a whole.
Meanwhile, cognitive semantic theories are typically built on the
argument that lexical meaning is conceptual. That is, meaning is not
necessarily reference to the entity or relation in some real or
possible world. Instead, meaning corresponds with a concept held in
the mind based on personal understanding. As a result, semantic facts
like "All bachelors are unmarried males" are not treated as special
facts about our language practices; rather, these facts are not
distinct from encyclopaedic knowledge. In treating linguistic
knowledge as being a piece with everyday knowledge, the question is
raised: how can cognitive semantics explain paradigmatically semantic
phenomena, like category structure? Set to the challenge, researchers
have drawn upon theories from related fields, like cognitive
psychology and cognitive anthropology. One proposal is to treat in
order to explain category structure in terms of 'nodes' in a
'knowledge network'. One example of a theory from cognitive science
that has made its way into the cognitive semantic mainstream is the
theory of prototypes, which cognitive semanticists generally argue is
the cause of polysemy.
Cognitive semanticists argue that truth-conditional semantics is
unduly limited in its account of full sentence meaning. While they are
not on the whole hostile to truth-conditional semantics, they point
out that it has limited explanatory power. That is to say, it is
limited to indicative sentences, and does not seem to offer any
straightforward or intuitive way of treating (say) commands or
expressions. By contrast, cognitive semantics seeks to capture the
full range of grammatical moods by also making use of the notions of
framing and mental spaces.
Another trait of cognitive semantics is the recognition that meaning
is not fixed but a matter of construal and conventionalization. The
processes of linguistic construal, it is argued, are the same
psychological processes involved in the processing of encyclopaedic
knowledge and in perception. This view has implications for the
problem of compositionality. An account in cognitive semantics called
the dynamic construal theory makes the claim that words themselves are
without meaning: they have, at best, "default construals," which are
really just ways of using words. Along these lines, cognitive
semantics argues that compositionality can only be intelligible if
pragmatic elements like context and intention are taken into
consideration.
The structure of concepts
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Cognitive semantics has sought to challenge traditional theories in
two ways: first, by providing an account of the meaning of sentences
by going beyond truth-conditional accounts; and second, by attempting
to go beyond accounts of word meaning that appeal to necessary and
sufficient conditions. It accomplishes both by examining the structure
of concepts.
Frame semantics
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Frame semantics, developed by Charles J. Fillmore, attempts to explain
meaning in terms of their relation to general 'understanding', not
just in the terms laid out by truth-conditional semantics. Fillmore
explains meaning in general (including the meaning of lexemes) in
terms of '"frames"'. By "frame" is meant any concept that can only be
understood if a larger system of concepts is also understood.
Fillmore: framing
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Many pieces of linguistic evidence motivate the frame-semantic
project. First, it has been noted that word meaning is an extension of
our bodily and cultural experiences. For example, the notion of
'restaurant' is associated with a series of concepts, like 'food,
service, waiters, tables, and eating'. These rich-but-contingent
associations cannot be captured by an analysis in terms of necessary
and sufficient conditions, yet they still seem to be intimately
related to our understanding of "restaurant".
Second, and more seriously, these conditions are not enough to account
for asymmetries in the ways that words are used. According to a
semantic feature analysis, there is nothing more to the meanings of
"boy" and "girl" than:
# BOY [+MALE], [+YOUNG]
# GIRL [+FEMALE], [+YOUNG]
And there is surely some truth to this proposal. Indeed, cognitive
semanticists understand the instances of the concept held by a given
certain word may be said to exist in a 'schematic relation' with the
concept itself. And this is regarded as a legitimate approach to
semantic analysis, so far as it goes.
However, linguists have found that language users regularly apply the
terms "boy" and "girl" in ways that go beyond mere semantic features.
That is, for instance, people tend to be more likely to consider a
young female a "girl" (as opposed to "woman"), than they are to
consider a borderline-young male a "boy" (as opposed to "man"). This
fact suggests that there is a latent frame, made up of cultural
attitudes, expectations, and background assumptions, which is part of
word meaning. These background assumptions go up and beyond those
necessary and sufficient conditions that correspond to a semantic
feature account. Frame semantics, then, seeks to account for these
puzzling features of lexical items in some systematic way.
Third, cognitive semanticists argue that truth-conditional semantics
is incapable of dealing adequately with some aspects of the meanings
at the level of the sentence. Take the following:
# You didn't spare me a day at the seaside; you deprived me of one.
In this case, the truth-conditions of the claim expressed by the
antecedent in the sentence are not being denied by the proposition
expressed after the clause. Instead, what is being denied is the way
that the antecedent is framed.
Finally, with the frame-semantic paradigm's analytical tools, the
linguist is able to explain a wider range of semantic phenomena than
they would be able to with only necessary and sufficient conditions.
Some words have the same definitions or intensions, and the same
extensions, but have subtly different domains. For example, the
lexemes 'land' and 'ground' are synonyms, yet they naturally contrast
with different things -- 'sea' and 'air', respectively.
As we have seen, the frame semantic account is by no means limited to
the study of lexemes�with it, researchers may examine expressions at
more complex levels, including the level of the sentence (or, more
precisely, the utterance). The notion of framing is regarded as being
of the same cast as the pragmatic notion of 'background assumptions'.
Philosopher of language John Searle explains the latter by asking
readers to consider sentences like "The cat is on the mat". For such a
sentence to make any sense, the interpreter makes a series of
assumptions: i.e., that there is gravity, the cat is parallel to the
mat, and the two touch. For the sentence to be intelligible, the
speaker supposes that the interpreter has an idealized or default
frame in mind.
Langacker: profile and base
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An alternate strain of Fillmore's analysis can be found in the work of
Ronald Langacker, who makes a distinction between the notions of
'profile' and 'base'. The profile is the concept symbolized by the
word itself, while the base is the encyclopedic knowledge that the
concept presupposes. For example, let the definition of "radius" be "a
line segment that joins the center of a circle with any point on its
circumference". If all we know of the concept 'radius' is its profile,
then we simply know that it is a line segment that is attached to
something called the "circumference" in some greater whole called the
"circle". That is to say, our understanding is fragmentary until the
base concept of 'circle' is firmly grasped.
When a single base supports a number of different profiles, then it
can be called a "'domain'". For instance, the concept profiles of
'arc, center, and circumference' are all in the domain of 'circle',
because each uses the concept of 'circle' as a base. We are then in a
position to characterize the notion of a frame as being either the
base of the concept profile, or (more generally) the domain that the
profile is a part of.
Categorization and cognition
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A major divide in the approaches to cognitive semantics lies in the
puzzle surrounding the nature of category structure. As mentioned in
the previous section, semantic feature analyses fall short of
accounting for the frames that categories may have. An alternative
proposal would have to go beyond the minimalistic models given by
classical accounts, and explain the richness of detail in meaning that
language speakers attribute to categories.
'Prototype theories', investigated by Eleanor Rosch, have given some
reason to suppose that many natural lexical category structures are
graded, i.e., they have prototypical members that are considered to be
"better fit" the category than other examples. For instance, robins
are generally viewed as better examples of the category "bird" than,
say, penguins. If this view of category structure is the case, then
categories can be understood to have central and peripheral members,
and not just be evaluated in terms of members and non-members.
In a related vein, George Lakoff, following the later Ludwig
Wittgenstein, noted that some categories are only connected to one
another by way of 'family resemblances'. While some classical
categories may exist, i.e., which are structured by necessary and
sufficient conditions, there are at least two other kinds:
'generative' and 'radial'.
'Generative categories' can be formed by taking central cases and
applying certain principles to designate category membership. The
principle of similarity is one example of a rule that might generate a
broader category from given prototypes.
'Radial categories' are categories motivated by conventions, but not
predictable from rules. The concept of "mother", for example, may be
explained in terms of a variety of conditions that may or may not be
sufficient. Those conditions may include: being married, has always
been female, gave birth to the child, supplied half the child's genes,
is a caregiver, is married to the genetic father, is one generation
older than the child, and is the legal guardian. Any one of the above
conditions might not be met: for instance, a "single mother" does not
need to be married, and a "surrogate mother" does not necessarily
provide nurturance. When these aspects collectively cluster together,
they form a prototypical case of what it means to be a mother, but
nevertheless they fail to outline the category crisply. Variations
upon the central meaning are established by convention by the
community of language users.
For Lakoff, prototype effects can be explained in large part due to
the effects of idealized cognitive models. That is, domains are
organized with an ideal notion of the world that may or may not fit
reality. For example, the word "bachelor" is commonly defined as
"unmarried adult male". However, this concept has been created with a
particular ideal of what a bachelor is like: an adult, uncelibate,
independent, socialized, and promiscuous. Reality might either strain
the expectations of the concept, or create false positives. That is,
people typically want to widen the meaning of "bachelor" to include
exceptions like "a sexually active seventeen-year-old who lives alone
and owns his own firm" (not technically an adult but seemingly still a
bachelor), and this can be considered a kind of straining of the
definition. Moreover, speakers would tend to want to exclude from the
concept of 'bachelor' certain false positives, such as those adult
unmarried males that don't bear much resemblance to the ideal: i.e.,
the Pope, or Tarzan. Prototype effects may also be explained as a
function of either basic-level categorization and typicality,
closeness to an ideal, or stereotyping.
So viewed, prototype theory seems to give an account of category
structure. However, there are a number of criticisms of this
interpretation of the data. Indeed, Rosch and Lakoff, themselves chief
advocates of prototype theory, have emphasized in their later works
that the findings of prototype theory do not necessarily tell us
anything about category structure. Some theorists in the cognitive
semantics tradition have challenged both classical and prototype
accounts of category structure by proposing the dynamic construal
account, where category structure is always created "on-line"�and so,
that categories have no structure outside of the context of use.
Mental spaces
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In traditional semantics, the meaning of a sentence is the situation
it represents, and the situation can be described in terms of the
possible world that it would be true of. Moreover, sentence meanings
may be dependent upon propositional attitudes: those features that are
relative to someone's beliefs, desires, and mental states. The role of
propositional attitudes in truth-conditional semantics is
controversial. However, by at least one line of argument,
truth-conditional semantics seems to be able to capture the meaning of
belief-sentences like "Frank believes that the Red Sox will win the
next game" by appealing to propositional attitudes. The meaning of the
overall proposition is described as a set of abstract conditions,
wherein Frank holds a certain propositional attitude, and the attitude
is itself a relationship between Frank and a particular proposition;
and this proposition is the possible world where the Red Sox win the
next game.
Still, many theorists have grown dissatisfied with the inelegance and
dubious ontology behind possible-worlds semantics. An alternative can
be found in the work of Gilles Fauconnier. For Fauconnier, the meaning
of a sentence can be derived from "mental spaces". Mental spaces are
cognitive structures entirely in the minds of interlocutors. In his
account, there are two kinds of mental space. The 'base space' is used
to describe reality (as it is understood by both interlocutors).
'Space builders' (or 'built space') are those mental spaces that go
beyond reality by addressing possible worlds, along with temporal
expressions, fictional constructs, games, and so on. Additionally,
Fauconnier semantics distinguishes between 'roles' and 'values'. A
semantic role is understood to be description of a category, while
values are the instances that make up the category. (In this sense,
the role-value distinction is a special case of the type-token
distinction.)
Fauconnier argues that curious semantic constructions can be explained
handily by the above apparatus. Take the following sentence:
# In 1929, the lady with white hair was blonde.
The semanticist must construct an explanation for the obvious fact
that the above sentence is not contradictory. Fauconnier constructs
his analysis by observing that there are two mental spaces (the
present-space and the 1929-space). His 'access principle' supposes
that "a value in one space can be described by the role its
counterpart in another space has, even if that role is invalid for the
value in the first space". So, to use the example above, the value in
1929-space is 'the blonde', while she is being described with the role
of 'the lady with white hair' in present-day space.
Conceptualization and construal
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As we have seen, cognitive semantics gives a treatment of issues in
the construction of meaning both at the level of the sentence and the
level of the lexeme in terms of the structure of concepts. However, it
is not entirely clear what cognitive processes are at work in these
accounts. Moreover, it is not clear how we might go about explaining
the ways that concepts are actively employed in conversation. It
appears to be the case that, if our project is to look at 'how'
linguistic strings convey different semantic content, we must first
catalogue 'what' cognitive processes are being used to do it.
Researchers can satisfy both requirements by attending to the
'construal operations' involved in language processing�that is to say,
by investigating the ways that people 'structure their experiences'
through language.
Language is full of conventions that allow for subtle and nuanced
conveyances of experience. To use an example that is readily at hand,
framing is all-pervasive, and it may extend across the full breadth of
linguistic data, extending from the most complex utterances, to tone,
to word choice, to expressions derived from the composition of
morphemes. Another example is 'image-schemata', which are ways that we
structure and understand the elements of our experience driven by any
given sense.
According to linguists William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, there are four
broad cognitive abilities that play an active part in the construction
of construals. They are: attention/salience, judgment/comparison,
situatedness, and constitution/gestalt. Each general category contains
a number of subprocesses, each of which helps to explain the ways we
encode experience into language in some unique way.
See also
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*Force dynamics
*Image schema
*Cognitive linguistics
*Conceptual role semantics
*Frame semantics
*Construction grammar
License
=========
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License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_semantics
