Cognitive Semantics Studies
摘要
Emerging in the 1970s as a transformative movement, cognitive linguistics represents a groundbreaking approach that has reoriented linguistic research over the past four decades. Grounded in experientialist philosophy, this theoretical framework offers innovative conceptual perspectives for systematically describing, analyzing, and explaining diverse linguistic phenomena. As a part of the cognitive linguistics movement, cognitive semantics has abandoned the tradition of purely formal language research. It has incorporated the issue of semantics (meaning) into the core topics of linguistic research, with a particular focus on the problems of meaning construction and knowledge representation. Moreover, it has unified the two traditionally separate fields of pragmatics and semantics. The cognitive semantics is not a single semantic theory, but a new language view or meaning view. The cognitive semantics theory usually takes “meaning is conceptual” as its basic theoretical claim. In terms of vocabulary, its meaning is not the entity or relationship in the “real world” that the word refers to, but rather a concept formed in the mind based on the experience related to that entity or relationship. This means that semantics is not objective and semantic knowledge is not isolated either. Instead, they processed the attribute of encyclopedic knowledge. Therefore, cognitive semantics theory generally establishes a semantic analysis framework of “cognitive modes, conceptual structures, and semantic systems” based on interactive experiences and cognitive processing. This framework is used to study and describe the formation, comprehension, and mental representation of the meanings of words and sentences.