Cognitive Semantics

Cognitive semantics is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of meaning and mind. It is a subfield of cognitive linguistics (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics article “Cognitive Linguistics”). In the most specific sense, it is the field that is defined by the research on conceptual structure conducted by Leonard Talmy. In a broader sense, the term also covers research in philosophy, psychology, neural science, artificial intelligence, and other subject fields in cognitive science that takes the relationship between meaning and mind as the main object of study. Cognitive semantics views language as one of the major cognitive systems and is best characterized at different levels and perspectives. Evolutionarily, cognitive semantics takes language among the most recent cognitive systems to evolve in the human lineage. Paralleled with language are culture, story, music, and dance; later cognitive systems include affect, forward simulation, and inferencing; the earliest systems are perception in general and motor control. Cognitively, cognitive semantics studies the many and varied aspects of human cognition through conceptual organization by analyzing a crucial set of fundamental conceptual domains including space and time, motion and location, causation and force interaction, attention and viewpoint, action and events, etc. Cross-linguistically, cognitive semantics studies the conceptual patterns, conceptual schemas, linguistic typologies, motivating mechanisms, etc. that are formed in conceptual structuring process. More specifically, cognitive semantics studies the cognitive process that is involved in the grammatical manipulation. For instance, the process of adding a plural form ‘s’ to ‘apple’ to form ‘apples’ involves the cognitive process of pluralizing. The process from representing the same conceptual content in two clauses to a representation in a single clause involves the cognitive process of integration of macro-event. Diachronically, cognitive semantics studies the mechanisms that motivate a semantic change, especially, change from an open-class form to a closed-class form, and the mechanisms that motivate the shift of conceptual patterns and typologies.