Concept
Cognitive semantics
Overview
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.
Cognitive semantics has introduced innovations like prototype theory, conceptual metaphors, and frame semantics, and it is the linguistic paradigm/framework that since the 1980s has generated the most studies in lexical semantics. 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 and Dirk Geeraerts. Some cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Talmy, take into account syntactic structures as well.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these categories shows clearly that this analysis consists of a system of primary and secondary relations…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Cognitive semantics is.
227.] Finite Cognition, when it pre-supposes what is distinguished from it to be something already existing and confronting it,--to be the various facts of external nature or of consciousness--has, in the first place, (1) Formal identity or the abstraction of universality for the form of its action. Its activity therefore consists in analysing the given concrete object, isolating its differences, and giving them the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Cognitive semantics is.
It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Cognitive semantics is.
Related ideas
- Eleanor Rosch
- Intension
- John Searle
- Type–token distinction
- Judgement
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Morpheme
- Linguistics
- Phonology
- Grammatical mood
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Donald Davidson (philosopher)
- Propositional attitude
- Pragmatics
- George Lakoff
- Cognitive psychology
- Alfred Tarski
- Cognitive linguistics
- Principle of compositionality
- Prototype theory
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of language.