Semantic structure

Linguistic expressions refer to entities or describe situations or scenes. Entities and scenes can be relatively concrete objects or events, or they can relate to more subjective experiences, such as feeling remorse or joy or experiencing unrequited love. According to Talmy, the way language conveys entities and scenes is by reflecting or encoding the language user’s Cognitive Representation (CR) or conceptual system. In other words, although the conceptual system is not open to direct investigation, the properties of language allow us to recon struct the properties of the conceptual system and to build a model of that system that, among other things, explains the observable properties of language. Talmy suggests that the CR, as manifested in language, is made up of two systems, each of which brings equally important but very different dimensions to the scene that they construct together. These systems are the conceptual structuring system and the conceptual content system. While the conceptual structuring system, as its name suggests, provides the structure, skeleton or ‘scaffolding’ for a given scene, the content system provides the majority of rich substantive detail. It follows from this view that the meaning associated with the conceptual structuring system is highly schematic in nature, while the meaning associated with the conceptual content system is rich and highly detailed. This distinction is captured in Figure 6.14.

It is important to emphasise that the system represented in Figure 6.14 relates to the conceptual system as it is encoded in semantic structure. In other words, semantic structure represents the conventional means of encoding conceptual structure for expression in language. The bifurcation shown in Figure 6.14 reflects the way language conventionally encodes the conceptual structure that humans externalise in language. Nevertheless, we reiterate a point here that we made in Chapter 5: while lexical concepts are conceptual in nature, in the sense that they prompt for conceptual structures of various kinds, the range of lexical concepts conventionally encoded in language must represent only a small fraction of the range and complexity of conceptual structure in the mind of any given human being. Indeed, as we will see in various chapters throughout Part II of the book, the range of concepts available in the conceptual system and the meaning potential associated with these concepts is vast. This means that while semantic structure must, to some extent at least, reflect conceptual structure, and while semantic structure can be thought of as a subset of conceptual structure a system of lexical concepts specialised for expression in language – the relationship between conceptual structure and semantic structure is nevertheless complex and indirect. (As we will see later in this part of the book, the conceptual structure associated with linguistic units such as words are prompts for complex processes of conceptualisation, what Gilles Fauconnier refers to as backstage cognition.)

Given the hypothesis that semantic structure reflects conceptual structure, the system of semantic structure is also divided into two subsystems, reflecting the bifurcation in the CR. These two systems are the open-class semantic systemand the closed-class semantic system that have already been introduced in previous chapters. These semantic subsystems correspond to the formal distinction between open-class elements (for example, nouns like man, cat, table, verbs like kick, run, eat, and adjectives like happy, sad) and closed-class elements (idioms like kick the bucket, grammatical patterns like declarative or interrogative constructions, grammatical relations like subject or object, word classes like the category verb, grammatical words like in or the, and bound morphemes like -er in singer).

As we have seen, the crucial difference between open-class and closed-class semantics is that while open-class semantics provides rich content, closed-class semantics contributes primarily to the structural content. However, a caveat is in order here. Given the view within cognitive linguistics that meaning and grammar cannot be divorced, the division of semantic structure into two sub systems sets up a somewhat artificial boundary (as we will see in Part III of the book). After all, free morphemes like prepositions (in, on, under and so on) which belong to the closed-class system exhibit relatively rich meaning distinctions. Therefore the distinction between the closed-class and open-class semantic subsystems might be more insightfully viewed in terms of distinct points on a continuum rather than in terms of a clear dividing line. We will elaborate this position in Part III by presenting the arguments put forward by cognitive grammarian Ronald Langacker, who suggests that while there is no principled dis tinction between the lexicon and the grammar, there are nevertheless qualitatively distinct kinds of phenomena that can be identified at the two ends of the continuum. The idea of a lexicon-grammar continuum is represented in Figure 6.15. We might place a lexical concept like FLUFFY at the open-class end, and the concept PAST relating to a grammatical morpheme like -ed at the closed class end, while the lexical concept relating to in might be somewhere in the middle of the continuum.

Talmy’s research has examined the way in which both the open-class and closed-class semantic systems encode the CR. However, he has been primarily concerned with elaborating the semantics of the closed-class subsystem, the part of semantic structure that is at the grammar ‘end’ of the continuum shown in Figure 6.15. We defer a detailed presentation of this aspect of Talmy’s theory until Part III of the book which explicitly focuses on grammar (Chapter 15). However, Talmy’s work is important for our investigation of cognitive semantics for at least two reasons: (1) Talmy’s theory illustrates that the closed-class or grammatical subsystem is meaningful (albeit schematic); (2) Talmy’s findings suggest that the grammatical subsystem encodes meaning that relates to key aspects of embodied experience, such as the way SPACE and TIME are configured in language, and the way that the closed-class system encodes experiential meaning arising from phenomena such as attention, perspective and force dynamics. For these reasons, Talmy’s research both illustrates and supports the position adopted in cognitive semantics that semantic structure reflects conceptual structure which in turn reflects embodied experience. We turn next to Talmy’s proposals concerning the schematic systems that comprise the CR.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Problems with the dictionary view

The dictionary view

Dictionaries versus encyclopaedias

The encyclopaedic view of meaning

Embodiment and conceptual structure summary

Schematic systems

Conceptual structure

Image schemas and abstract thought

Properties of image schemas

What is an image schema?

Image schemas

Embodiment and conceptual structure