The Cognitive Construction Perspective

Language, as we know it, is a superficial manifestation of hidden, highly abstract, cognitive constructions. Essential to such constructions is the operation of structure projection between domains. And therefore, essential to the understanding of cognitive construction is the characterization of the domains over which projection takes place. Mental spaces are the domains that discourse builds up to provide a cognitive substrate for reasoning and for interfacing with the world. This chapter will recapitulate the main properties of mental-space connections.

Under a standard and popular view of language organization, the joint production of form and meaning results from the divided labor of several theoretical components. The semantic component “interprets” syntactically generated structures, by assigning them context-independent truth conditions. A pragmatic component, itself possibly divided into subcomponents, is able to fix up this “literal” interpretation in various ways and to take the context into account.

Although this perspective turns out to be inadequate, it has proven quite useful for the purpose of framing important questions in a precise way, and it has provided initial, powerful methods for classifying “facts” pertaining to meaning and dealing with them analytically. Until the mid-sixties, it was still assumed within linguistics that no operational study of natural language meaning was feasible unless it stemmed from a study of form. The great success of research in syntax at the time suggested that the underlying levels of sentence structure discovered on the basis of distributional regularities would be the key to a genuine scientific approach to natural language semantics.