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COGNITIVE SEMANTICS IN CONTEXT
Yusupov Oybek Nematjonovich,
researcher
Tashkent State Pedagogical University, Uzbekistan
ABSTRACT
In this article describes cognitive semantics in context. The role of context in the interpretation of a linguistic unit has long been considered, even if from different perspectives: from the view that regards context as an extralinguistic feature, to the position that meaning is only meaning in use and therefore, pragmatics and semantics are inseparable. Still, context, both linguistic and situational, is often considered as an a posteriori factor in linguistic analysis. However, when language is studied in use, context always comes first in cognitive analyses, directing the process of meaning construction from the very beginning.
Key words: Context, meaning construction, lexical meaning, pragmatics, cognitive semantics.
Cognitive semantics began in the 1970s as a reaction against the objectivist world-view assumed by the Anglo-American tradition in philosophy and the related approach, truth-conditional semantics, developed within formal linguistics. Eve Sweetser, a leading cognitive linguist, describes the truth-conditional approach in the following terms: "By viewing meaning as the relationship between words and the world, truth-conditional semantics eliminates cognitive organization from the linguistic system" (Sweetser 1990: 4). In contrast to this view, cognitive semantics sees linguistic meaning as a manifestation of conceptual structure: the nature and organisation of mental representation in all its richness and diversity, and this is what makes it a distinctive approach to linguistic meaning. Leonard Talmy, one of the original pioneers of cognitive linguistics in the 1970s, describes cognitive semantics as follows: "Research on cognitive semantics is research on conceptual content and its organization in language" (Talmy 2000: 4).
Cognitive semantics, like the larger enterprise of cognitive linguistics of which it is a part, is not a single unified framework. Those researchers who identify themselves as cognitive semanticists typically have a diverse set of foci and interests.
A fundamental concern for cognitive semanticists is the nature of the relationship between conceptual structure and the external world of sensory experience. In other words, cognitive semanticists set out to explore the nature of human interaction with and awareness of the external world, and to build a theory of conceptual structure that is consonant with the ways in which we experience the world. One idea that has emerged in an attempt to explain the nature of conceptual organisation on the basis of interaction with the physical world is the embodied cognition thesis. As we saw, this thesis holds that the nature of conceptual organisation arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily
experience with which it is associated.
Let's illustrate this idea with an example. Imagine a man in a locked room. A room has the structural properties associated with a bounded landmark: it has enclosed sides, an interior, a boundary and an exterior. As a consequence of these properties, the bounded landmark has the additional functional property of containment: the man is unable to leave the room. Although this seems rather obvious, observe that this instance of containment is partly a consequence of the properties of the bounded landmark and partly a consequence of the properties of the human body. Humans cannot pass through minute crevices like gas can, or crawl through the gaps under doors like ants can. In other words, containment is a meaningful consequence of a particular type of physical relationship that we have experienced in interaction with the external world.
The concept associated with containment is an instance of what cognitive linguists call an image schema. In the cognitive model, the image-schematic concept represents one of the ways in which bodily experience gives rise to meaningful concepts. While the concept container is grounded in the directly embodied experience of interacting with bounded landmarks, image-schematic conceptual structure can also give rise to more abstract kinds of meaning. For example, consider the following examples from Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 32):
a. He's in love.
b. We're out of trouble now.
c. He's coming out of the coma.
d. I'm slowly getting into shape.
e. He entered a state of euphoria.
f. He fell into a depression.
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) both argue that examples like the ones in are licensed by the metaphorical projection of the container image schema onto the abstract conceptual
domain of states, to which concepts like love, trouble and health belong. Thisresulte inthe conceptual metaphor states are containers. The idea behind metaphorical projection is that meaningful stru sSure from bodily experience gives rise to concrete co cepts like the container image schema, which in turn serves to structure more abstract conceptual domains like states. In this way, conceptual structure is embodied.
Semantic structure is conceptual structure
This principle asserts that language refers to concepts in the mind of the speaker rather than to objects in the external world. In other words, semantic structure (the meanings conventionally associated with words and other linguistic units) can be equated with concepts.
However, the claim that semantic structure can be equated with conceptual structure does not mean that the two are identical. Instead, cognitive semanticists claim that the meanings associated with words, for example, form only a subset of possible concepts. After all, we have many more thoughts, ideas and feelings than we can conventionally encode in language. For example, we have a concept for the place on our faces below our nose and above our mouth where moustaches go. We must have a concept for this part of the face in order to understand that the hair that grows there is called a moustache.
However, as Langacker (1987) points out, there is no English wsrd thrt conventinnuUy encodes tins concept (at least not in the non-specialist vocabulary of everyday language). It follows that the set of lexical concepts is only a subset of the entire set of concepts in the mind of the speaker.
For a theory of language, this principle is of greater significance than we might think. Recall that semantic structure relates not just to words but to all linguistic units. A linguistic unit might be a word like cat, a bound morpheme such as - er, as in driver or teacher, or indeed a larger conventional pattern, like the structure of an active sentence or a passive sentence: William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. [active] Romeo and Juliet was written by William Shakespeare. [passive]
Because active and passive constructions are conventionally associated with a functional distinction, namely the point of view we are adopting with respect to the subject of the sentence, cognitive linguists claim that the active and passive structures are themselves meaningful: in active sentences we are focusing on the active participant in an event by placing this unit at the front of the construction. In passive sentences, we are focusing on the participant that undergoes the action. The conventional meanings associated with these grammatical constructions are
admittedly schematic, but they are nevertheless meaningful. According to the view adopted in cognitive semantics, the same holds for smaller grammatical units as well, including words like the and tense morphemes like - ed in wondered.
For present purposes, the idea that grammatical categories or constructions are essentially conceptual in nature entails that closed-class elements as well as open-class elements fall within the purview of semantic analysis. Indeed, Talmy (2000) explicitly focuses upon closed-class semantics. One of the properties that makes cognitive semantics different from other approaches to language, then, is that it seeks to provide a unified account of lexical and grammatical organisation rather than viewing these as distinct subsystems.
There are two important caveats that follow from the principle that semantic structure represents a subpart of conceptual structure. Firstly, it is important to point out that cognitive semanticists are not claiming that language relates to concepts internal to the mind of the speaker and nothing else. This would lead to an extreme form of subjectivism, in which concepts are divorced from the world that they relate to (see Sinha 1999). Indeed, we have concepts in the first place either because they are useful ways of understanding the external world, or because they are inevitable ways of understanding the world, given our cognitive architecture and our physiology. Cognitive semantics therefore steers a path between the opposing extremes of subjectivism and the objectivism encapsulated in traditional truth-conditional semantics by claiming that concepts relate to lived experience.
Let's look at an example. Consider the concept BACHELOR. This is a much-discussed example in the semantics literature. This concept, which is traditionally defined as an "unmarried adult male", is not isolated from ordinary experience because we cannot in fact apply it to all unmarried adult males. We understand that some adult males are ineligible for marriage due either to vocation or to sexual preference (at least while marriage is restricted to occurring between members of the opposite sex). It is for this reason that we would find it odd to apply the term bachelor to either the Pope or a homosexual male, even though they both, strictly speaking, meet the "definition" of BACHELOR.
The second caveat concerns the notion of semantic structure. We have assumed so far that the meanings associated with words can be defined: for example, BACHELOR means "unmarried adult male". However, we have already begun to see that word meanings, which we are calling lexical concepts, cannot straightforwardly be defined. Indeed, strict definitions like "unmarried adult male" fail to adequately capture the range and diversity of meaning associated with any given lexical concept. For this reason, cognitive semanticists reject the definitional or dictionary view of word meaning in favour of an encyclopaedic view.
Meaning representation is encyclopaedic
The third central principle of cognitive semantics holds that semantic structure is encyclopaedic in nature. This means that words do not represent neatly packaged bundles of meaning (the dictionary view), but serve as "points of access" to vast repositories of knowledge relating to a particular concept or conceptual domain (e.g. Langacker 1987). We illustrated this idea above in relation to the concept BACHELOR. Indeed, not
only do we know that certain kinds of unmarried adult males would not normally be described as bachelors, we also have cultural knowledge regarding the behaviour associated with stereotypical bachelors. It is 'encyclopaedic' knowledge of this kind that allows us to interpret this otherwise contradictory sentence:
"Watch out Jane, your husband's a right bachelor!"
On the face of it, identifying Jane's husband (a married man) as a bachelor would appear to be contradictory. However, given our cultural stereotype of bachelors, which represents them as sexual predators, we understand the utterance in as a warning issued to Jane concerning her husband's fidelity. As this example illustrates, the meanings associated with words often draw upon complex and sophisticated bodies of knowledge.
Of course, to claim that words are "points of access" to encyclopaedic meaning is not to deny that words have conventional meanings associated with them. The fact that example A means something different from example B is a consequence of the conventional range of meanings associated with safe and happy.
(A) Sardor is safe.
(B) Anvar is happy.
However, cognitive semanticists argue that the conventional meaning associated with a particular word is just a "prompt" for the process of meaning construction: the "selection" of an appropriate interpretation against the context of the utterance. For example, the word safe has a range of meanings, and the meaning that we select emerges as a consequence of the context in which the word occurs. To illustrate this point, consider the examples in against the context of a child playing on the beach.
a. The child is safe.
b. The beach is safe.
c. The shovel is safe.
In this context, the interpretation of (a) is that the child will not come to any harm. However, (b) does not mean that the beach will not come to harm. Instead, it means that the beach is an environment in which the risk of the child coming to harm is minimised. Similarly, (c) does not mean that the shovel will not come to harm, but that it will not cause harm to the child. These examples illustrate that there is no single fixed property that safe assigns to the words child, beach and shovel. In order to understand what the speaker means, we draw upon our encyclopaedic knowledge relating to children, beaches and shovels, and our knowledge relating to what it means to be safe. We then "construct" a meaning by "selecting" a meaning that is appropriate in the context of the utterance.
Just to give a few examples, the sentence in (b) could be interpreted in any of the following ways, given an appropriate context.
The philosophical interest in the relationship between meaning, truth and reality has a long and venerable tradition dating back to the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers over 2,000 years ago. Since Aristotle, philosophers who have attempted to understand the concept of truth have equated this notion with reality as a guarantor of truth. This approach is called the correspondence theory and holds that a truth bearer (for example, a natural language sentence) is true if it corresponds to a state of affairs holding in the world. From this perspective, truth is a property of sentences that correspond
to a reality they describe. The twentieth-century philosopher Alfred Tarski was influential in arguing that meaning could be equated with truth defined in terms of its correspondence with the world: if a sentence is true by virtue of its correspondence with some state of affairs, then this truth condition constitutes its meaning. Consider the following excerpt from Tarski's classic paper first published in 1944:
Semantics is a discipline which deals with certain relations between expressions of a language and the objects (or "states of affairs") "referred to" by those expressions. (Tarski [1944] 2004: 119; original emphasis.
From this perspective, linguistic meaning is truth defined in terms of correspondence to reality. Meaning can therefore be defined in terms of the conditions that hold for a sentence to be true.
Tarski argued that truth can only be defined for those languages whose semantic structure has been exactly defined and that it is not possible to define the semantic structure of a language that is self-defining. For example, in anatural language, words are defined using other words in the language: if we 'define' bachelor as 'an unmarried adult male', we are using other words from the same language to define the word. According to Tarski, this fails to provide an objective definition, because it relies on words from the same language to understand other words. Tarski describes languages that are self-defining as closed because they fail to provide an objective definition of a particular term or expression. Therefore he argues that in order to establish the meaning of a sentence from a given natural language, we need to be able to translate the sentence from that object language into a metalanguage, a language that can be precisely and objectively defined. Tarski argues that predicate calculus, which was pioneered by the philosopher Gottlob Frege in his work on logic, provides a logic-based metalanguage for capturing the 'invariant' (semantic or context-independent) aspects of meaning. According to this view, predicate calculus, or a similar "logical" language, provides a means of capturing meaning in a way that is objective, precisely stated, free from ambiguity and universal in the sense that it can be applied to any natural language.
In addition to schematic systems, language has many other forms of extensive and integrated conceptual organization, such as the three presented next. Although Figure/Ground organization and fictive organization could be respectively comprehended under the attentional and the configurational schematic systems, and force dynamic organization has elsewhere been treated as a fourth schematic system, these are all extensive enough and cut across enough distinctions to be presented here as separate bodies of conceptual organization.
In this survey, the field of cognitive linguistics in general and of cognitive semantics in particular is seen to have as its
central concern the representation of conceptual structure in language. The field addresses properties of conceptual structure both local and global, both autonomous and interactive, and both typological and universal. And it relates these linguistic properties to more general properties of cognition. While much has already been done in this relatively young linguistic tradition, it remains quite dynamic and is extending its explorations in a number of new directions.
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