Semantics and Cognition: An Introduction

Langackerians and Chomskyites alike would probably agree that the purpose of linguistic analysis is to explicate the mental representations and processes resulting in linguistic behavior, and so a fundamental issue of current linguistic theory is the cognitive processing of meaning. The intersection of semantics and cognition has developed along at least four lines: (1) Meaning is equivalent to conceptualization, schematically and structurally represented in the human mind; (2) the meanings of clauses or sentences are essentially based on the semantic properties of predicates with reference to their argument roles; (3) phrasal constructions carry independent meanings which interact with the meanings of verbs in non-trivial ways; (4) interpretation of meaning does not rely solely on semantic structure, but is crucially ascribed to pragmatic factors (such as discourse manipulation or talk-in-interaction). The discussion that follows will sketch out these four approaches.