eg: ‘Watch out Jane, your husband’s a right bachelor!’ (cultural stereotype, sexual predators)
※Conventional meaning associated with a particular word is just a ‘prompt’ for the process of meaning construction: the ‘selection’ of an appropriate interpretation against the context of the utterance.
eg: container
※ the concept container is grounded in the directly embodied experience of interacting with bounded landmarks, image schematic conceptual structure can also give rise to more abstract kinds of meaning.
Four Guiding Principles
1. Conceptual structure is embodied. 2. Semantic structure is conceptual structure. 3. Meaning representation is encyclopaedic. 4. Meaning-construction is conceptualisation.
4. Meaning construction is conceptualisation
※language itself does not encode meaning. meaning is constructed at the conceptual level: meaning construction is equated with conceptualisation, a dynamic process whereby linguistic units serve as prompts for an array of conceptual operations and the recruitment of background knowledge.
2.The second caveat concerns the notion of semantic structure.
lexical concepts, cannot straightforwardly be defined.
eg: bachelor strict definitions like ‘unmarried adult male’
※ Semantic structure can be equated with conceptual structure does not mean that the two are identical.Semantic structure forms only a subset of possible concepts.
※ This principle has great significance not just for words but for all linguistic units. eg: active sentence, passive sentence
(2) William Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. (3) Romeo and Juliet was written by William Shakespeare.
What is Cognitive Semantics?
Cognitive semantics： 1970s, against the objectivist world-view and the related approach, truth-
conditional semantics, developed within formal linguistics.The study of the relationship between experience, embodied cognition and language.
1.Conceptual structure is embodied
Embodied cognition thesis: this thesis holds that the nature of conceptual organisation arises from bodily experience, so part of what makes conceptual structure meaningful is the bodily experience with which it is associated.
eg: a. The child is safe.
b. The beach is safe.
c. The shovel is safe.
no fixed property of safe , encyclopaedic knowledge relating to children, beaches and shovels, and knowledge relating to safe, ‘construct’ a meaning by ‘selecting’ a meaning that is appropriate in the context of the utterance.
subjectivism
objectivism
eg: bachelor, unmarried adult male,
It's traditional meaning is not isolated from ordinary experience because we cannot in fact apply it to all unmarried adult males, eg: Pope or homosextual.
eg: a. He’s in love.
b. We’re out of trouble now. c. He entered a state of euphoria.
Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) explain that examples by the metaphorical projection of the CONTAINER image schema onto the abstract conceptual domain of STATES, to which concepts like LOVE,TROUBLE and HEALTH belong. This results in the conceptual metaphor STATES ARE CONTAINERS.
※ The idea of grammatical categories or constructions are essentially conceptual in nature entails that closed-class elements as well as openclass elements fall within the purview of semantic analysis.
Talmy (2000), closed-class semantics it seeks to provide a unified account of lexical and
grammatical organisation rather than viewing these as distinct subsystems.
What is Cognitive Semantics?
黄小沛
Outline
1. Cognitive semantics 2. Four guiding principles 3. Methodology 4. Formal vs cognitive approaches to semantics
eg: a man in a locked room, structural properties, a bounded landmark, enclosed sides, an interior, a boundary and an exterior.

container
containment is a meaningful consequence of a particular type of physical relationship that we have experienced in interaction with the external world.
Two Important Caveats
1. Cognitive semanticists are not claiming that language relates to concepts internal to the mind of the speaker and nothing else.
fail to adequately capture the range and diversity of meaning associated with any given lexical concept.
For this reason, cognitive semanticists reject the definitional or dictionary view of word meaning in favour of an encyced with containment is an instance of what cognitive linguists call an image schema.