Cognitive Semantics: An overview

The linguistic representation of conceptual structure is the central concern of the two-to-three decades old field that has come to be known as “cognitive linguistics”. Its approach is concerned with the patterns in which and processes by which conceptual content is organized in language. It addresses the linguistic structuring of such basic conceptual categories as space and time, scenes and events, entities and processes, motion and location, and force and causation. To these it adds the basic ideational and affective categories attributed to cognitive agents, such as attention and perspective, volition and intention, and expectation and affect. It addresses the semantic structure of morphological and lexical forms, as well as of syntactic patterns. And it addresses the interrelationships of conceptual structures, such as those in metaphoric mapping, those within a semantic frame, those between text and context, and those in the grouping of conceptual categories into large structuring systems. Overall, its aim is to ascertain the global integrated system of conceptual structuring in language.