Aspects of Meaning Construction

As a whole, it offers the reader a broad range of interrelated topics in Semantics. Needless to say, investigating how meaning is constructed is a never-ending line of research which has been present in linguistic enquiry for centuries. From Aristotle to Chosmky, the Objectivist paradigm has assumed the existence of a mind-independent reality and of an autonomous linguistic module which processes meaning. According to this school of thought, it is the task of a computational reasoning to collect the data of human experience, to dissect them mechanically, and to store them taxonomically in terms of elemental semantic blocks. Research in cognitive science (Pollio et al. 1977; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Smith et al. 1981; Johnson-Laird 1988) has demonstrated that language is not “a self-contained system amenable to algorithmic characterization, with sufficient autonomy to be studied in essential isolation from broader cognitive concerns” (Langacker 1991). Rather, language is a tool that speakers use along with contextual clues for a conceptual representation of reality. Linguistic units allow for the identification of pre-conceptual and conceptual structures supporting our mental functioning (Gibbs 1996), and enhance the understanding of how the human conceptual system constructs meaning. Meaning construction is thus the product of fundamental cognitive processes, like metaphor and metonymy, image schemas and conceptual integration