چکیده:
The paper addresses the main questions to be dealt with by any semantic theory which is committed to provide an explanation of how meaning is possible. On one side the paper argues that the resources provided by the development of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, cognitive psychology, and general linguistics in the 20th Century, however indispensable to investigate the structure of language, rely on the existence of end products in the morphogenesis of meaning. On the other, the paper argues that philosophy of language, which, either in the analytic or the structuralist or the hermeneutical tradition, made little use of such resources (when they are not simply rejected). Left the main question unanswered. Though phenomenology intended to focus on the constitutive process, it ended up mostly with philology. Cognitive semantics paved the way to focus on patterns of bodily interaction within the natural environment out of which basic schemes emerge and are metaphorically “lifted” to any universe of discourse. The explanatory commitment is thus endorsed through two hypotheses: (1) these schemes, of topological and kinaesthetic structure, determine the range of forms of atomic sentences of any natural language, and (2) the category-theoretic notion of universality allows for a proper analysis of how such schemes are “lifted”.
خلاصه ماشینی:
On one side the paper argues that the resources provided by the development of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, cognitive psychology, and general linguistics in the 20th Century, however indispensable to investigate the structure of language, rely on the existence of end products in the morphogenesis of meaning.
2 Turning to cognitive grammar: one milestone was the analysis of metaphor as a cognitive process which transfers meanings out of bodily experience into and across other domains, thereby revealing the motion-laden nature of mind and providing a clue to the way in which the structure of any thought is manifested in language.
And just as the early analytic philosophers had sound motives for making use of logic in the analysis of both natural and formal languages, so there are sound motives for exploring topics relevant to the theory of meaning with the aid of notions drawn from the category-theoretic presentation of linguistic and inferential structure.
The obstacles met so far can be overcome by taking jointly into consideration the following three kinds of constraints: D1) the system dynamics which allows for the emergence of gestalts – and in particular the role of topological ur-gestalts in establishing primal reference to identifiable places, objects, object-states and actions; D2) the way in which logical properties are intrinsically tied to the cohesive and variable structure of the objects composing the universe of discourse; D3) the spatial roots of any syncategorematic expression, and thus of all notions through which syntax is built up.