Abstract
Cognitive semio-linguistics studies the relations between signs and language, that is, between semiological and linguistic structures, as expressions of, and as causes of, the cognitive activities involved in thinking, here called epistemic activities. This short essay displays a leveled analysis of the relations holding between semio-linguistic and epistemic structures active in the human mind.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This is the basic point made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1960). The essay “Sur la phénoménologie du langage” (1951, in 1960) is particularly important to the present analysis.
- 2.
In view of the immense conceptual range of diagrammatic representations, the study of the natural “logic” of diagrams is an important task for a cognitive semiotics (see “The Semantics of Diagrams”, Brandt (2004)).
- 3.
Yuri Lotman (1990) made a similar observation, suggesting that the mutual translation of irreducibly different semiotic systems is a core principle in meaning production.
- 4.
Linguistic representation of meaning is closely related to intersubjective contact and affective communication, because it offers nuanced emotional information; semiological representation is more closely and directly related to (pure) thinking, precisely because it does not convey such emotional information.
- 5.
We will comfortably ignore the strifes of theories of language that has characterized the history of linguistics from its origins in nineteenth century philology to its present agony in the arms of computer science.
- 6.
1D: One dimension. The decoding process can be seen as a “funnel” leading from 1D to 3D and 3D+ structures, through the 2D structures of syntax.
- 7.
Tone of information: mode of enunciation – volitive, interrogative, assertive, affective, or other (ironic, quotative, etc.).
- 8.
My own more special theory of so-called stemmatic grammar is briefly summarized in Brandt 2004 et passim. It builds on the discovery that the semantics of syntactic nodes is schematic and canonical: a short list of semantically informed nodes form canonical cascades that allow recursion and thereby establishes our capacity to spontaneously create and immediately grasp even very complex syntactic networks as meaningful. This discovery solves the problem of defining case structure in a finite and manageable way.
- 9.
Schank and Abelson 1977; Fillmore and Atkins 1992. Literature on frames and scripts is extensive, although the problem of formatting the frames has not been solved.
- 10.
Croft (2007) and Chafe (2005) refer to semantics, or meaning, as a whole of experience that grammar partializes, and interpretation retotalizes. I consider this view as cognitively insufficient; utterance meaning rather represents situational meaning, which further represents knowledgebased epistemic meaning, which represents the embodied process of thinking itself. Meaning is a stack of representations, inside and outside of language.
- 11.
Root words that label categories are of course linked to level III structure, since they are constant components under variation of possible grammatical structures, and they are core components of frames.
- 12.
Meaning through language is thus both “shallow level” (flat) and still d“eep” and encyclopedic, that is, rooted in long-term memorized knowledge. Hagoort and van Berkum (2007) show that in fact world knowledge is immediately activated in sentence decoding.
- 13.
A theory of such semantic or experiential domains, also called ontological domains, is given in Brandt 2004. Temporal cognition schemas are different in the basic domains D1–D4, and object categories are essentially different. Others are characteristically distinct: everybody (D1), we/they (D2), I myself (D3), you whom I am addressing (D4).
- 14.
Neigboring tribal cultures that share language fight far more violently than neighboring tribes that speak different languages. In relatively densely populated areas in Africa, the linguistic diversity is considerable. Here is an example: “Cameroon is home to 230 languages. These include 55 Afro-Asiatic languages, two Nilo-Saharan languages, and 174 Niger-Congo languages. This latter group is divided into one West Atlantic language (Fulfulde), 32 Adamawa- Ubangui languages, and 142 Benue-Congo languages (130 of which are Bantu languages)”. From a Wikipedia article.
- 15.
The Danish cartoon crisis (triggered by the drawing of a muslim with turban-bomb) is a striking example; though it remains unclear what precisely the cartoon is “saying”, its provocative force is empirically proven.
References
Brandt PA (2004) Spaces, domains, and meaning. Essays in cognitive semiotics. Peter Lang Verlag, Bern European Semiotics Series, No 4
Chafe W (2005) The relation of grammar to thought. In: Butler, Gómez-González, Doval-Suárez (eds) The dynamics of language use: functional and contrastive perspectives, John Benjamins, Amsterdam pp 57-78
Croft W (2007) The origins of grammar in the verbalization of experience. Cogn Linguist 18-3:339-382
Fillmore CJ, Atkins BT (1992) Towards a frame-based organization of the lexicon. In: Adrienne Lehrer, Eva Kittay (eds) Frames, fields, and contrasts: new essays in semantics and lexical organization. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, pp 75-102
Hagoort P, van Berkum J (2007) Beyond the sentence given. Philos Trans Ro Soc 362:801-811
Lotman Y, (1990) (Eng. transl. Ann Shukman) The universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington
Merleau-Ponty M (1960) Signes. Gallimard, Paris
Schank RC, Abelson RP (1977) Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brandt, P.A. (2010). Thinking and Language. In: Glatzeder, B., Goel, V., Müller, A. (eds) Towards a Theory of Thinking. On Thinking. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03129-8_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03129-8_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03128-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03129-8
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)