Cognitive semantics
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Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. The main tenets of cognitive semantics are, first, that semantic structure is conceptual structure, and meaning-construction is conceptualisation; second, that conceptual structure is embodied; and third, that meaning representation is encyclopaedic.[citation needed]
As part of the field of cognitive linguistics, the cognitive semantics approach rejects the traditional modularisation of linguistics into phonology, syntax, pragmatics, etc. Instead, it divides semantics (meaning) into meaning-construction and knowledge representation. Therefore, cognitive semantics studies much of the area traditionally devoted to pragmatics as well as semantics. Cognitive semantics is typically used as a tool for lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts and Bruce Wayne Hawkins.
Cognitive semantic theories are typically built on the argument that lexical meaning is conceptual. That is, the meaning of a lexeme is not reference to the entity or relation in the "real world" that the lexeme refers to, but to a concept in the mind based on experiences with that entity or relation. An implication of this is that semantics is not objective and also that semantic knowledge is not isolatable from encyclopaedic knowledge.
Moreover, cognitive semantic theories are also typically built upon the idea that semantics is amenable to the same mental processes as encyclopaedic knowledge. They thus involve many theories from cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology such as prototypicality, which cognitive semanticists argue is the basic cause of polysemy.[citation needed]
Another trait of cognitive semantics is the recognition that lexical 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.
Many cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Leonard Talmy take into account syntactic structures as well, while others focus mainly on lexical entities.
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[edit] Major cognitive models
As a field, semantics is interested in two big questions: what does it mean for units of language, called lexemes, to have "meaning"? And what does it mean for sentences to have meaning? Traditional theories in semantics have tended to explain both in terms of truth-conditions. The meaning of a particular sentence may be understood as the conditions under which the content conveyed by the sentence hold true. For instance, the expression "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is, in fact, white. Moreover, lexemes can be understood as holding meaning either by virtue of sets of things in real or possible worlds (called the "extension" of the word), or in terms of the common properties that hold between these things (called its "intension", usually phrased in terms of a definition, or in terms of semantic features). The intension provides interlocutors with the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to qualify under the extension of a meaning.
Cognitive semantics has sought to challenge traditional theories in two ways: first, by providing an account of the meaning of sentences without resorting directly to notions of truth; and second, by attempting to go beyond accounts of word meaning that appeal to necessary and sufficient conditions.
[edit] Frame semantics
Frame semantics, developed by Charles J. Fillmore, attempts to explain the meaning of lexemes in terms of their relation to general understanding, not just in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Fillmore explains the meaning of a lexeme in terms of "frames", or ways of understanding. By "frame" is meant any concept that can only be understood if a larger system of concepts is also understood.
Many pieces of linguistic evidence motivate this project. First, word meaning seems to be 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.[1] These 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".
Also, 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]
Yet linguists have found that language users apply the terms using more than just the semantic features. That is, 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"). [1] This fact suggests that there is a latent frame, made up of cultural attitudes and expectations, which is part of word meaning up and beyond necessary and sufficient conditions.
Frame semantics argues that truth-conditional semantics is incapable of dealing adequately with 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, no claim about the world is being denied in the clause. Instead, what is being denied is the way that a claim is being made, i.e., how it is being framed. [1]
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. [1]
With these 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 -- air and sea, respectively. [1]
The frame-semantic insight can be especially useful when it comes to describing the problems in translating utterances between languages. Though two languages may be able to describe the same concept-profiles, certain concept-frames may be more difficult to evoke in one language over the other. For instance, German has two words, essen and fressen, which each describe the process of eating; but the former suggests that the person eating is human, while the latter suggests they are an animal. Although both can be technically used to describe a human eating, the choice of words will frame the meaning in an important way. In order to capture the "animal-eating" frame, English speakers might have to resort to idioms or metaphors (such as "He was pigging out"). [1]
[edit] Mental spaces
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. [2] However, by at least one line of argument, truth-conditional semantics seems to be able to capture the meaning of sentences like "Frank believes that the Red Sox will win the next game" in terms of conditions under which Frank holds a certain propositional attitude, and the attitude is itself a relationship between Frank and a particular proposition (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 cognitive semantics. In the work of Gilles Fauconnier, the meaning of a sentence can be derived from "mental spaces". Mental spaces are cognitive structures which exist entirely in the minds of interlocutors. There are two kinds of mental space, for Fauconnier. 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. [1] 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" (Croft:35). 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.
[edit] Non-classical categories
Prototype theories, investigated in detail by Eleanor Rosch, have given reason to suspect that many natural lexical categories are graded categories which are rich in detail. If so, then they 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 are those which can be formed by taking central cases and applying certain principles to designate category membership. Radial categories are those categories which are motivated by conventions, but are not predictable from rules. The concept of "mother", for example, may be explained in terms of a variety of conditions which 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.[3] 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 which 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.[3]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b c d e f g Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1,7-15,33-39.
- ^ Bunnin, Nicholas and E. P. Tsui-James. The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.
- ^ a b Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. University of Chicago Press, 82-83, 70.
