Cognitive Semantics: Meaning and Cognition

✍ Scribed by Jens S. Allwood (ed.), Peter Gärdenfors (ed.)

• Publisher: John Benjamins
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 215
• Series: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 55
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Toward the end of the 20th century, there is both a dissatisfaction with existing formal semantic theories and a wish to preserve insights from other semantic traditions. Cognitive semantics, the latest of the major trends which have dominated the century, attempts to do this by focusing on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. This book provides different perspectives on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. Jens Allwood presents an approach where meaning is analyzed in terms of context sensitive cognitive operations. Peter Gärdenfors examines the relationship between cognitive semantics and standard formal extensional and intensional semantics. Peter Harder discusses the relation between functionalism and cognitive semantics. Sören Sjöström and +ke Viberg extend a cognitive semantic approach to new empirical domains like vision and physical contact. Elisabeth Engberg Pedersen extends the use of cognitive semantics even further in order to analyze deaf sign language and, finally, Kenneth Holmqvist and Jordan Zlatev discuss two different possibilities of implementing a cognitive semantic approach using computer programs. The variety of perspectives on cognitive semantics make this book suitable as course material.

✦ Table of Contents

Content: 1. Preface, pvii; 2. Semantics as Meaning Determination with Semantic-Epistemic Operations (by Allwood, Jens), p1; 3. Some Tenets of Cognitive Semantics (by Gardenfors, Peter), p19; 4. Function, Cognition, and Layered Clause Structure (by Harder, Peter), p37; 5. From Vision to Cognition. A study of metaphor and polysemy in Swedish (by Sjostrom, Soren), p67; 6. Polysemy and Differantiation in the Lexicon (by Viberg, Ake), p87; 7. Space and Time (by Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth), p131; 8. Conceptual Engineering (by Holmqvist, Kenneth), p153; 9. Situated Embodied Semantics and Connectionist Modeling (by Zlatev, Jordan), p173; 10. Name Index, p195; 11. Subject Index, p197