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 and Dirk Geeraerts. Some cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Talmy, take into account syntactic structures as well.
Points of contrast
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. 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, and the resulting set of instances, many connected to the center by a single shared trait, are reminiscent of a wheel with a hub and spokes.
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, non-celibate, 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. 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.