What is a domain

According to Langacker, ‘Domains are necessarily cognitive entities: mental experiences, representational spaces, concepts, or conceptual complexes’ (Langacker 1987: 147). In other words, domains are conceptual entities of varying levels of complexity and organisation. The only prerequisite that a knowledge structure has for counting as a domain is that it provides back ground information against which lexical concepts can be understood and used in language. For instance, expressions like hot, cold and lukewarm designate lexical concepts in the domain of TEMPERATURE: without understanding the temperature system, we would not be able to use these terms. In this respect, the theory of domains is very much like Fillmore’s theory of frames.

 However, the theory of domains adds to the theory of Frame Semantics in four important respects. Firstly, while Fillmore acknowledges that concepts can be structured in terms of multiple frames (or domains), Langacker argues that this is actually the typical arrangement. The range of domains that structure a single lexical concept is called the domain matrix of that concept. Clausner and Croft illustrate this idea in the following way:

 Our commonsense knowledge about birds for example includes their shape, the fact that they are made of physical material, their activities such as flying and eating, the avian lifecycle from egg to death, etc. These aspects of the concept bird are specified in a variety of different domains such as SPACE, PHYSICAL OBJECTS, LIFE, TIME, and so on. (Clausner and Croft 1999: 7)

Secondly, Langacker addresses an additional level of conceptual organisation that, although implicit in Fillmore’s work, was not explicitly worked out within the theory of Frame Semantics. This relates to the distinction between basic domains and abstract domains. This distinction rests upon the notion of experiential grounding or embodiment which we discussed in Chapter 6. While some basic domains like SPACE and TIME derive directly from the nature of our embodied experience, other domains like MARRIAGE, LOVE or MEDIEVAL MUSICOLOGY are more abstract, in the sense that, although they are ultimately derived from embodied experience, they are more complex in nature. For instance, our knowledge of LOVE may involve knowledge relating to basic domains, such as directly embodied experiences like touch, and physical proximity, and may also involve knowledge relating to abstract domains, such as experience of complex social activities like marriage ceremonies, hosting dinner parties and so on. While Fillmore’s theory primarily addresses abstract domains, Langacker’s theory addresses both basic and abstract domains.

Thirdly, as we will see in the next section, domains are organised in a hierarchical fashion in Langacker’s model. This means that a particular lexical concept can simultaneously presuppose a domain lower down the hierarchy and represent a subdomain for a lexical concept further up the hierarchy (see Figure 7.5). For example, while the concept ELBOW is understood with respect to the domain ARM, the concept ARM is understood with respect to the domain BODY. In this way, the relationship between domains reflects meronymic (part–whole) relations.

Finally, Fillmore’s emphasis in developing a theory of Frame Semantics is somewhat different from Langacker’s emphasis in developing a theory of domains. While Fillmore, particularly in more recent work (e.g. Fillmore and Atkins 1992), views frames as a means of accounting for grammatical behaviour like valence relations (recall examples (1)–(2)), Langacker’s theory of domains is more concerned with conceptual ontology: the structure and organisation of knowledge, and the way in which concepts are related to and understood in terms of others.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

The theory of domains

Consequences of adopting a frame-based model

Speech event frames

The COMMERCIAL EVENT frame

Frames in cognitive psychology

What is a semantic frame?

Frame semantics

The encyclopaedic view

Word meaning versus sentence meaning

Problems with the dictionary view

The dictionary view

Dictionaries versus encyclopaedias