Commitments of cognitive semantics
The label cognitive semantics covers a variety of quite different approaches. In general, however, these approaches are characterized by a holistic vision of the place of language within cognition. For many investigators, this involves the following commitments:
• a rejection of a modular approach to language
• an identification of meaning with ‘conceptual structure’
• a rejection of the syntax–semantics distinction
• a rejection of the semantics–pragmatics distinction
We will briefly outline each of these commitments in turn.
Rejection of modularity Many cognitivists share a commitment to understanding language as governed by the same cognitive principles at work in other psychological domains. This holistic approach to language structure contrasts with the strongly modular approach promoted by investigators in the tradition of Chomsky (1965) and Fodor (1983). Modular research assumes that language is one of a number of independent mod ules or faculties within cognition, each of which has a structure and principles independent of those at work in other cognitive domains. On a modular vision of the mind, the principles of the language module will be entirely distinct from those of the others, like vision, memory, reasoning or musical cognition. Cognitivists like Langacker (1987), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and Lakoff (1987) reject the modularist idea that language constitutes an independent cognitive competence governed by its own distinctive principles. Instead, cognitivist research pursues a holistic understanding of language structure, in which linguistic data are explained through psychological mechanisms known to operate elsewhere in cognition.
For instance, Langacker proposes that the general psychological phenomenon of attention, our ability to attend selectively to different aspects of a scene, can be used to understand a wide range of linguistic and grammatical phenomena. One example would be the contrast in the meanings of words like buy and sell. These words both evoke the same scene, that of a transaction between two parties, but each of them directs attention to, or profiles, different aspects of it: buy profiles (directs attention to, highlights) the perspective of the buyer, sell that of the seller. This selective profiling is interpreted by Langacker as the linguistic analogue of our ability to focus our attention onto a narrow subset of the total visual or auditory stimuli in our perceptual field, ignoring others, such as when we concentrate on a single conversation in a loud restaurant, or follow the position of a ball in a tennis match. The conceptualization underlying buy and sell, in other words, differs only in what part is profiled.
Meaning as conceptual structure Most cognitivists share a rejection of the dictionary–encyclopedia distinction (see 3.3): in the words of Jackendoff (2002: 293), ‘we must consider the domain of linguistic semantics to be continuous with human conceptualization as a whole’. In other words, studying linguistic meaning is the same thing as studying the nature of human conceptual structure – a cover-all term for our ‘thoughts, concepts, perceptions, images, and mental experience in general’ (Langacker 1987: 98). The meaning of a word like house simply is the concept we have of houses; as discussed in 3.3, any aspect of the knowledge we have of houses can become linguistically relevant. Cognitive approaches to semantics aim to describe the full knowledge structures that are associated with the words of a language. As a result, conceptualist descriptions of the meanings of words are considerably more rich, complex and open-ended than in other varieties of semantic analysis.
Rejection of the semantics–syntax distinction Just as language as a whole is not seen as a distinct cognitive capacity in conceptualist frame works, so too the language-internal division between semantics and syntax often recognized in linguistics is typically rejected. Evans and Green (2006) identify a number of fundamental cognitive principles which do not respect any division between these two domains: proto type effects, polysemy (4.3) and metaphor (see below), for example, seem to exist not only in the domain of word meaning, but in morphology and syntax as well. It has even sometimes been suggested that phono logical categories are prototypes. This is all taken as a reason not to assume that syntax and semantics constitute different domains, and that linguists will most fruitfully spend their time seeking explanatory principles which apply across them all. (This problematization of the syntax–semantics boundary is not unique to cognitive linguistics: it is also characteristic of, for example, systemic functional grammar; see e.g. Halliday and Matthiessen 2004.)
Rejection of the semantics–pragmatics distinction Cognitive linguistics also typically rejects the distinction between a purely semantic level of word meaning and a non-semantic level of language use. This means that facts which in other frameworks might be attributed to inferences based on literal meanings (see Chapter 4) are assumed to reflect aspects of the actual, literal meaning of the words concerned. We will see in the sections that follow how this and the other related commitments of cognitive semantics affect the analyses of semantic content proposed in these frameworks.
