Semantic structure is conceptual structure
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C5P158
2025-12-15
30
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. As we saw in Chapter 3, these conventional meanings associated with words are linguistic concepts or 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 morpheme such as -er, as in driver or teacher, or indeed a larger conventional pattern, like the structure of an active sentence (2) or a passive sentence (3):
Because active and passive constructions are conventionally associated with a functional distinction, namely the point of view we are adopting with respect to the subject of the sentence, cognitive linguists claim that the active and passive structures are themselves meaningful: in active sentences we are focusing on the active participant in an event by placing this unit at the front of the construction. In passive sentences, we are focusing on the participant that undergoes the action. The conventional meanings associated with these grammatical constructions are admittedly schematic, but they are nevertheless meaningful. According to the view adopted in cognitive semantics, the same holds for smaller grammatical units as well, including words like the and tense morphemes like -ed in wondered. This is an idea that we discuss in more detail in Part III of the book.
For present purposes, the idea that grammatical categories or constructions are essentially conceptual in nature entails that closed-class elements as well as open-class elements fall within the purview of semantic analysis. Indeed, Talmy (2000) explicitly focuses upon closed-class semantics. 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.
There are two important caveats that follow from the principle that semantic structure represents a subpart of conceptual structure. Firstly, 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 (section 5.4) by claiming that concepts relate to lived experience.
The second caveat concerns the notion of semantic structure. We have assumed so far that the meanings associated with words can be defined: for example, BACHELOR means ‘unmarried adult male’. However, we have already begun to see that word meanings, which we are calling lexical concepts, cannot straightforwardly be defined. Indeed, strict definitions like ‘unmarried adult male’ fail to adequately capture the range and diversity of meaning associated with any given lexical concept. For this reason, cognitive semanticists reject the definitional or dictionary view of word meaning in favour of an encyclopaedic view.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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