2007. Language, mind, and the lexicon. Hamburg: Peter Lang.
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano2007
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
We all know that language is not possible without a mind. However, there are different ways in which language involves mental activity. The focus of the volume presented here will be precisely on one of those ways, in which the lexicon is the guiding principle of linguistic activity. This volume presents a selection of contributions around the topic of 'language, mind and the lexicon' which were part of the discussions at the fourth biannual conference of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, held in Saragossa (Spain) in 2004. The main topic of the conference was lexical meaning and different approaches to its study, and this choice was a consequence of the study that at the time the organizers were carrying out within the research project sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology entitled "Contrastive lexical categorization, with special emphasis on English" (ref. BFF2002-168). The main lines of this research project are described in the first chapter of the book, and are a good starting point for the discussion of many related issues that are presented by all the contributors in the following pages.
Related papers
Lexicography and cognitive linguistics
The lexicon of a language is not an unstructured list of words. In this paper, we exemplify some of the basic conceptual structures that cognitive linguists work with and we discuss their potential applications to lexicographic work. Specifically, we focus on the possible advantages of using cognitive linguistics as a theoretical background in the structuring of entries, meanings, and idioms in dictionaries. In connection with these organizational issues, we discuss the knowledge-based organization of the mental lexicon (known as conceptual frames), and a type of organization of the mental lexicon that seems to be much more characteristic of Hungarian than of English: organization according to certain "root morphemes. " We also deal with the conceptualization of an element within a topic area through another element within the same topic area (known as conceptual metonymy), the conceptualization of a topic area in terms of another topic area (known as conceptual metaphor); and the internal organization of the various senses of a word-concept (known as polysemy). We devote a section to idioms and their role as well as possible arrangement in the dictionary. Such thematic structures have, on the whole, remained outside the focus of everyday lexicographic practice. Here, we hope to demonstrate their importance and usefulness.
Studies in linguistics and cognition
2012
Contents: Barbara Eizaga Rebollar/Jose Maria Garcia Nunez/ Maria Angelez Zarco Tejada: Preface - Maria Tadea Diaz Hormigo/Carmen Varo Varo: Neology and Cognition - Gerard Fernandez Smith/Marta Sanchez-Saus Laserna/Luis Escoriza Morera: Studies on Lexical Availability: The Current Situation and Some Future Prospects - Maria Luisa Mora Millan: Adverbs in the Internet Lexicon: New Modes of Signification - Maria Angeles Zarco Tejada: `Holding' Metaphorical Meaning from a Computational Linguistics Approach: The Verb Hold and its Counterparts in Spanish - Jose Maria Garcia Nunez: Attitude Verbs and Nominalization - Carmen Noya Gallardo: Cleft Sentences: Semantic Properties and Communicative Meanings - Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez/Alicia Galera Masegosa: Metaphoric and Metonymic Complexes in Phrasal Verb Interpretation: Metaphoric Chains - Barbara Eizaga Rebollar: Meaning Adjustment Processes in Idiom Variants - Jose Luis Guijarro Morales: Beauty and Art in Science - Ana Isabel ...
Komlósi Argumentum 9 article on Mental Lexicon
The paper is a quest for cognitive and affective material in conceptualization in order to elaborate on the coordinating mechanisms between form (linguistic structure) and meaning (conceptual structure and semantic structure) residing in the Mental Lexicon. The Mental Lexicon is seen as an active and dynamic, highly complex network of both neural and mental processes coordinated by conceptualization and manifested in language used in social verbal interaction. It is also taken to assume a central role in conceptualization which in turn is responsible for processing mental contents (mental representations, image schemas, mental models, memories, beliefs, intentions, plans, desires, mental projections, images, etc.), which have both cognitive and affective components. The analysis of linguistic examples shows that there is a wide range of parameters influencing the interpretation of linguistic structure and natural language use starting from formal semantics to inferential pragmatics, including quantification, modalities, intensional contexts, epistemic contexts, intentions, propositional attitudes, deictic relations, presuppositions and implicatures.
Review of Geeraerts, Dirk ed. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics. Basic Readings
Cognitive Linguistics (CL) is not only a scientific approach to the study of language, but undoubtedly one of the most rapidly expanding schools in linguistics nowadays. As a dynamic and attractive framework within theoretical and descriptive linguistics, it proves to be one of the most exciting areas of research within the interdisciplinary project of cognitive science. Part of its seductiveness arises from the fact that CL aims at an integrated model of language and thought, at the building of a sharp theory of linguistic meaning that reflects the human construal of external reality, taking into account the way in which human beings experience reality, both culturally and psychologically (27). In its description of natural language, CL attempts to bridge "the distance between the social and the psychological, between the community and the individual, between the system and the application of the system, between the code and the actual use of the code" (26).
Cognitive Linguistics (Review)
Cognitive linguistics is the joint product of largely independent research programs begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s by scholars who shared the general goal of making grammatical and semantic theory responsible to the facts of usage and the flexibility of the human conceptual capacity. But what kind of product is it? To those outside the immediate spheres of influence of its major proponents (George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier, Leonard Talmy, among others), it might appear to be nothing more than an inventory of disparate constructs (prototype-based categories, semantic frames, mental spaces, metaphorical mappings) or even a set of case studies of linguistic idiosyncrasies. It doesn’t seem to DO anything, or at least it does not provide a uniform grammatical or semantic formalism. Instead, cognitive linguistics is a worldview, in which words, rather than denoting things in the world, are points of entry into conceptual networks (Langacker 1987, 1991), and syntactic patterns, rather than merely grouping symbols together, are cognitive and even motor routines of varying degrees of entrenchment and internal complexity (Bybee 2001).
Lexicography of Verb and Cognitive Linguistics (extended abstract in English)
The work of a linguist and a lexicographer in the field of lexical semantics has the largest common border. In the process of lexicography, a lexicographer faces one of the main issues in lexical semantics: polysemy. When a lexicographer is trying to define a polysemous word for a monolingual dictionary, he/she has to undertake a special task, so-called: sense discrimination, that means he/she has to make a distinction between various meanings of that word. Lexicographical practice in short appears to be in accordance with the lexicological observation that the distinction between meanings need not to be clear-cut. This has been a controversial problem in both disciplines. In order to provide some argumentations to the problem, this research is conducted with the help of the descriptive tools that cognitive linguistics offers, namely: the theory
Related topics
Related papers
Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics Introduction
Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.
A Contrastive Study of Lexical Semantics in English
Armenian Folia Anglistika
The article presents the initial generalizations of research in the fields of semantics and lexicography which are based on the examination carried out in 1962. Proceeding from the current results of the research, as well as the criteria elaborated in the fields of modern psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, the article puts forward the idea of the expansion of the lexical semantics in English and the existence of a basic semantic structure. The possibility of further similar researches with the inclusion of the Spanish vocabulary is also emphasized in the article.
Linguistic theories of lexical meaning1
Components of Emotional Meaning, 2013
Review Essay: Hubert Cuyckens, René Dirven, & John Taylor’s (2003) 'Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics'
Cognitive Linguistics, 18: 570–579, 2007
Cognitive Grammar and lexicography
In general lexicographical practice, theory is not often used to support lexicographic characteristics (Geeraerts 1987:1). This paper shows how theory, Cognitive Grammar specifically, can be used to support lexicographic decisions. The paper first considers Langacker's analysis of English episodic nominalization and verbalization (Langacker 1991:24-5). It then shows how the semantic intuitions of these two processes established from the theory can be characterized in a lexicographic entry. An episodic nominalization takes what Langacker calls a perfective verb and uses it as a noun. An example is found in the pair of sentences, He will walk around. He will go for a walk. The verbalization process is seen in the pair of sentences, He tasted the salt. He salted the food. Each pair of examples, though quite similar, represents a different semantic process developed conceptually in the analysis. These two processes can then be accounted for in lexicographical practice by standard conventions of range and sense as practiced by . Cognitive Grammar, in as much as possible, uses theoretical notions founded in cognitive psychology. The goal of these notions is to capture linguistically marked semantic nuances and intuitions of a language which makes this a good theory for applications such as lexicography. Likewise, in this paper, lexicography finds a suitable counterpart in Cognitive Grammar for the motivation and explanation of its intuitions.
Cognitive Semantics in the Romance Languages
Submitted to appear in: Michele Loporcaro & Francesco Gardani (eds.), Oxford Encyclopedia of Romance Linguistics.
Cognitive Semantics is an approach to the study of linguistic meaning. It is based on the assumption that the human linguistic capacity is part of our cognitive abilities, and that language in general and meaning in particular can therefore be better understood by taking into account the cognitive mechanisms that control the conceptual and perceptual processing of extra-linguistic reality. Issues central to CS are a) the notion of prototype and its role in the description of language, b) the nature of linguistic meaning and c) the functioning of different types of semantic relations. The question concerning the nature of meaning is an issue that is particularly controversial between CS on the one hand and structuralist and generative approaches on the other hand: is linguistic meaning conceptual, i.e. part of our encyclopedic knowledge (as is claimed by CS), or is it autonomous, i.e. based on abstract and language-specific features? According to CS, the most important types of semantic relations are metaphor, metonymy and different kinds of taxonomic relations, which, in turn, can be further broken down into more basic associative relations such as similarity, contiguity and contrast. These play a central role not only in polysemy and word formation, i.e. in the lexicon, but also in the grammar.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.