Semantics and Cognition


Book Description

This book emphasizes the role of semantics as a bridge between the theory of language and the theories of other cognitive capacities such as visual perception and motor control.




Historical Semantics and Cognition


Book Description

Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for American and European cognitive linguists to confront representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. Papers are in sections on theories and models, descriptive categories, and case studies, and examine areas such as cognitive and structural semantics, diachronic prototype semantics, synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy, and intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change.




Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology


Book Description

This open access book presents novel theoretical, empirical and experimental work exploring the nature of mental representations that support natural language production and understanding, and other manifestations of cognition. One fundamental question raised in the text is whether requisite knowledge structures can be adequately modeled by means of a uniform representational format, and if so, what exactly is its nature. Frames are a key topic covered which have had a strong impact on the exploration of knowledge representations in artificial intelligence, psychology and linguistics; cascades are a novel development in frame theory. Other key subject areas explored are: concepts and categorization, the experimental investigation of mental representation, as well as cognitive analysis in semantics. This book is of interest to students, researchers, and professionals working on cognition in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.




Cognitive Semantics


Book Description

Toward the end of the 20th century, there is both a dissatisfaction with existing formal semantic theories and a wish to preserve insights from other semantic traditions. Cognitive semantics, the latest of the major trends which have dominated the century, attempts to do this by focusing on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. This book provides different perspectives on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. Jens Allwood presents an approach where meaning is analyzed in terms of context sensitive cognitive operations. Peter Gärdenfors examines the relationship between cognitive semantics and standard formal extensional and intensional semantics. Peter Harder discusses the relation between functionalism and cognitive semantics. Sören Sjöström and +ke Viberg extend a cognitive semantic approach to new empirical domains like vision and physical contact. Elisabeth Engberg Pedersen extends the use of cognitive semantics even further in order to analyze deaf sign language and, finally, Kenneth Holmqvist and Jordan Zlatev discuss two different possibilities of implementing a cognitive semantic approach using computer programs. The variety of perspectives on cognitive semantics make this book suitable as course material.




Evaluative Semantics


Book Description

Evaluation, from connotations to complex judgements of value, is probably the most neglected dimension of meaning. Calling for a new understanding of truth and value, this book is a comprehensive study of evaluation in natural language, at lexical, syntactic and discursive levels. Jean Pierre Malrieu explores the cognitive foundations of evaluation and uses connectionist networks to model evaluative processes. He takes into account the social dimension of evaluation, showing that ideological contexts account for evaluative variability. A discussion of compositionality and opacity leads to the argument that a semantics of evaluation has some key advantages over truth-conditional semantics and as an example Malrieu applies his evaluative semantics to a complex Shakespeare text. His connectionist model yields a mathematical estimation of the consistency of text with ideology, and is particularly useful in the identification of subtle rhetorical devices such as irony.




Ten Lectures on Cognitive Semantics


Book Description

In his ten Beijing lectures, Leonard Talmy represents the range of his work in cognitive semantics. The central concern of this approach is the linguistic representation of conceptual structure, that is, the patterns in which and processes by which conceptual content is organized in language. The lectures examine the semantics of grammar, force dynamics, a typology of how motion events are represented, factive versus fictive motion, a typology of event integration, differences in how spoken and signed language structure space, the attention system of language, introspection as a methodology in linguistics, the relation of language to other cognitive systems, and digitalization in the Evolution of language.




Toward a Cognitive Semantics


Book Description

V.1 concept structuring systems -- V.2 Typology and process in concept structuring.




Semantics - Theories


Book Description

Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material gathered here is perfect for anyone who needs a detailed and accessible introduction to the important semantic theories. Designed for a wide audience, it will be of great value to linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language. The book covers theories of lexical semantics, cognitively oriented approaches to semantics, compositional theories of sentence semantics, and discourse semantics. This clear, elegant explanation of the key theories in semantics research is essential reading for anyone working in the area.




Meaning and Cognition


Book Description

The aim of this book is to present significant aspects of cognitive grammar by adopting an interdisciplinary approach. The book provides an interplay of contributions by some exponents of cognitive grammar (Langacker, Croft, Wood, Geeraerts, Kövecses, Wildgen), and philosophers of language (Albertazzi, Marconi, Peruzzi, Violi) who, in most cases, share a phenomenological and Gestalt approach to the problem of semantics. The topics covered include themes that are central to the debate in cognitive grammar, such as, metaphor, construal operations, prototypicality, Gestalt schemes and field semantics. The book offers evidence to support the cognitive hypothesis in semantics and the existence of a close connection between the structures of perception and the categories of natural language. Because of the approach employed, with its consideration of borderline aspects among semantics, linguistics, theoretical reflection and historical analysis, the book marks out a route for a philosophical inquiry complementary to a cognitive approach to the semantics of natural language.




Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition


Book Description

Presenting original, detailed studies of keywords of Danish, this book breaks new ground for the study of language and cultural values. Based on evidence from the semantic categories of everyday language, such as the Danish concept of hygge (roughly meaning, ‘pleasant togetherness’), the book provides an integrative socio-cognitive framework for studying and understanding language-particular universes. It is argued that the worlds we live in are not linguistically and conceptually neutral, but rather that speakers who live by Danish concepts are likely to pay attention to their world in ways suggested by central Danish keywords and lexical grids. By means of a sophisticated semantic methodology, the author accounts for the meanings of even highly culture-specific and untranslatable linguistic concepts. The book offers new tools for comparative research into the diversity of semantic and cultural systems in contemporary Europe. Additionally, it contributes to the emerging discipline of cultural semantics, and to the ongoing debates of linguistic diversity, metalanguage, and the use of linguistic evidence in studies of culture and social cognition.