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Cognitive semantics in context Summery

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C13-P465

2026-02-03

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Cognitive semantics in context Summery

In this chapter we compared and contrasted cognitive semantics with two other modern approaches to linguistic meaning: formal (truth-conditional) semantics and Relevance Theory. As we observed, while the assumptions of truth-conditional semantics stand in direct opposition to the assumptions of cognitive semantics, certain claims made within Relevance Theory are more consonant with the cognitive approach. Truth-conditional semantics takes an objectivist approach to meaning, and is concerned with modelling sentences in terms of their correspondence to the ‘world’. This is achieved by first translating natural language sentences into a logical metalanguage, and then by establishing how the logical form derived corresponds to a particular model of reality, represented in terms of set theory. Formal semanticists have been primarily concerned with sentence meaning. Relevance Theory, in contrast, is a theory of communication. The main architects of the theory, Sperber and Wilson, emphasise the role of ostensive-inferential communication, relevance and inference. They argue that both explicit and implicit meaning construction relies upon contextual and encyclopaedic knowledge in giving rise to inferences, and that metaphor relies upon the same communicative goals as literal language. Despite these similarities, Relevance Theory assumes a generative model of language and therefore accepts the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. In these respects, Relevance Theory is formally oriented and rests upon guiding assumptions that stand in direct opposition to those of cognitive semantics.