From concepts to lexical items

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…the mental representations we use in higher level cognition) and that sentences could encode truth-evaluable compositions of concepts (i.e., psychologically real thoughts). It is also interesting to mention that the distinction between the semantic and the conceptual can be found as well both in work dating from the late eighties/early nineties (Bierwisch and Schreuder, 1992) as well as in recent work in Cognitive Linguistics (Evans, 2009). The idea, in all cases, is that the link between words and concepts is mediated by intermediate representations that, in one way or other, constrain what concepts a word can express.…”

“…(Travis, 1996: 451). And in Bierwisch and Schreuder's (1992) two-level semantics, the semantics of a word provides necessary conditions on its conceptual meaning, which is typically richer than its properly semantic meaning. Thorough the paper, I will take it that a thin meanings theory holds (a) that lexical meanings constrain the uses of a word, and (b) that they do it by encoding certain schematic meaning which applies to all, or at least most, of the correct uses of the word (for other proposals along these lines, and from different fields, see Ruhl, 1989, Klepousniotou et al, 2008, Frisson, 2009.…”

The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

“…Taken together, then, chimpanzees indicate that emerging conceptual capacities are necessary but not sufficient to produce language. The language system must therefore be a more specific and unique capacity, contrary to the fundamental tenet of Cognitive Linguistics that fails to distinguish between language and conceptual abilities (see also Bierwisch 1982Bierwisch , 1989Bierwisch & Schreuder, 1992).…”

“…In fact, as seen in §4.3, conceptual structure is best viewed as its own domain-specific intelligence that creates the messages language attempts (sometimes even unsuccessfully) to encode as accurately as possible (e.g. Bierwisch 1982Bierwisch , 1989Bierwisch & Schreuder, 1992). The main point is that these developments in Cognitive and Generative linguistic theory make it more likely that the nature versus nurture debate in language can now take its place alongside a second (equally important) debate that situates Linguistics within Cognitive Psychology, concerning how far each linguistic phenomenon exists either because of static encoding rules and constraints or because of the dynamic realtime processing mechanisms and resources that act upon them.…”

Boundaries and Prototypes in Categorizing Direction

“…However, in a different strand of research, the linguistic relativism debate initiated by Whorf (1956) is aimed at determining the extent and directionality of correspondences between language and thought (Bierwisch and Schreuder, 1992;Levinson et al, 2002;Li and Gleitman, 2002). With respect to spatial directions, this relationship has been subject to debate, as we will outline next.…”