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تسجيل

Conceptual structure

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة: 

2025-12-15

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Conceptual structure

As we have seen, an important line of investigation within cognitive semantics focuses on how language encodes (and reflects) conceptual structure. This line of investigation concerns the conceptual structuring mechanisms apparent in linguistic structure. One way of uncovering conceptual structure in language is by investigating the distinct functions associated with open-class and closed class semantic systems. Talmy (2000) argues that these two systems encode our Cognitive Representation (CR) in language. The closed-class semantic system (the system of meaning associated with grammatical constructions, bound morphemes and grammatical words like and and the) provides scene structuring representation. The open-class semantic system (the system of meaning associated with content words and morphemes) provides the substantive content relating to a particular scene. In Chapter 1, we illustrated the distinction between the open-class and closed-class subsystems with the following example:

The elements marked in bold, as well as the declarative word order (as opposed to the interrogative Did the hunter track the tigers? for example) form part of the system of closed-class semantics. They provide the ‘concept structuring’ elements of the meaning described in this scene, and provide information about when the event occurred, how many participants were involved, whether the participants are familiar to the speaker and hearer in the current discourse, whether the speaker asserts the information (rather than, say, asking a question about it) and so on. We can think of these closed-class elements as providing a kind of frame or scaffolding, which forms the foundations of the meaning in this sentence. The open-class semantic system relates to words like hunter, track and tiger, which impose rich contentful meaning upon this frame: who the participants are and the nature of event described in the scene. We look at these ideas in more detail in Chapter 6.