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What is COGNITIVE SEMANTICS? What does COGNITIVE SEMANTICS mean? COGNITIVE SEMANTICS meaning – COGNITIVE SEMANTICS definition – COGNITIVE SEMANTICS explanation.
Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license.
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive it. It is implicit that there is some difference between this conceptual world and the real world.
The main tenets of cognitive semantics are:
That grammar manifests a conception of the world held in a culture;
That knowledge of language is acquired and contextual;
That the ability to use language draws upon general cognitive resources and not a special language module.
As part of the field of cognitive linguistics, the cognitive semantics approach rejects the traditional separation of linguistics into phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, etc. Instead, it divides semantics into meaning-construction and knowledge representation. Therefore, cognitive semantics studies much of the area traditionally devoted to pragmatics as well as semantics.
The techniques native to cognitive semantics are typically used in lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, George Lakoff, Dirk Geeraerts, and Bruce Wayne Hawkins. Some cognitive semantic frameworks, such as that developed by Talmy, take into account syntactic structures as well. .
