In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is long entails that it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of X ?
An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. As an understudy to embodied cognition, image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking; by the collection From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady.
Prototype theory is a theory of categorization in cognitive science, particularly in psychology and cognitive linguistics, in which there is a graded degree of belonging to a conceptual category, and some members are more central than others. It emerged in 1971 with the work of psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and it has been described as a "Copernican revolution" in the theory of categorization for its departure from the traditional Aristotelian categories. It has been criticized by those that still endorse the traditional theory of categories, like linguist Eugenio Coseriu and other proponents of the structural semantics paradigm.
Force dynamics is a semantic category that describes the way in which entities interact with reference to force. Force Dynamics gained a good deal of attention in cognitive linguistics due to its claims of psychological plausibility and the elegance with which it generalizes ideas not usually considered in the same context. The semantic category of force dynamics pervades language on several levels. Not only does it apply to expressions in the physical domain like leaning on or dragging, but it also plays an important role in expressions involving psychological forces. Furthermore, the concept of force dynamics can be extended to discourse. For example, the situation in which speakers A and B argue, after which speaker A gives in to speaker B, exhibits a force dynamic pattern.
Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple things and processes in the world differently, not necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world and the real world.
Frame semantics is a theory of linguistic meaning developed by Charles J. Fillmore that extends his earlier case grammar. It relates linguistic semantics to encyclopedic knowledge. The basic idea is that one cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. For example, one would not be able to understand the word "sell" without knowing anything about the situation of commercial transfer, which also involves, among other things, a seller, a buyer, goods, money, the relation between the money and the goods, the relations between the seller and the goods and the money, the relation between the buyer and the goods and the money and so on. Thus, a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept to which it refers.
Mark Turner is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He has won an Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015) and a Grand Prix from the French Academy (1996) for his work in these fields. Turner and Gilles Fauconnier founded the theory of conceptual blending, presented in textbooks and encyclopedias. Turner is also the director of the Cognitive Science Network (CSN) and co-director of the Distributed Little Red Hen Lab.
Cognitive grammar is a cognitive approach to language developed by Ronald Langacker, which hypothesizes that grammar, semantics, and lexicon exist on a continuum instead of as separate processes altogether. This approach to language was one of the first projects of cognitive linguistics. In this system, grammar is not a formal system operating independently of meaning. Rather, grammar is itself meaningful and inextricable from semantics.
Semantic change is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage. In diachronic linguistics, semantic change is a change in one of the meanings of a word. Every word has a variety of senses and connotations, which can be added, removed, or altered over time, often to the extent that cognates across space and time have very different meanings. The study of semantic change can be seen as part of etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics.
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Structural semantics is a linguistic school and paradigm that emerged in Europe from the 1930s, inspired by the structuralist linguistic movement started by Ferdinand de Saussure's 1916 work "Cours De Linguistique Generale".
István Kecskés is a Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, USA. He teaches graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism at SUNY, Albany. He is the President of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) and the CASLAR Association. He is the founder and co-director of the Barcelona Summer School on Bi- and Multilingualism, and the founder and co-director of Sorbonne, Paris – SUNY, Albany Graduate Student Symposium (present).
Stefan Th. Gries is (full) professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.
Cliff Goddard is a professor of linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is, with Anna Wierzbicka, a leading proponent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic analysis. Goddard's research has explored cognitive and cultural aspects of everyday language and language use, and he is considered a leading scholar in the fields of semantics, and cross-cultural pragmatics. His work spans English,, indigenous Australian languages, and South East Asian languages.
Semantic structure analysis is a methodology for systematic description of the intended meaning of natural language, developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The name is also used for Eugene Nida's technique for mapping lexical items from a source language to a receptor language in translation theory.
Jeannine Clementine Theodora Beeken is a Flemish linguist. Her work in Dutch linguistics includes amongst others the development of the first academic software teaching platform for Dutch, esp. Dutch syntax, in the late 1980s, the discovery of three additional objects in contemporary Dutch and the rules for the revised Dutch spelling system, Groene Boekje 2005.
Cognitive sociolinguistics is an emerging field of linguistics that aims to account for linguistic variation in social settings with a cognitive explanatory framework. The goal of cognitive sociolinguists is to build a mental model of society, individuals, institutions and their relations to one another. Cognitive sociolinguists also strive to combine theories and methods used in cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics to provide a more productive framework for future research on language variation. This burgeoning field concerning social implications on cognitive linguistics has yet received universal recognition.
Dieter Gilberto Hillert is a German-American biolinguist and cognitive scientist. His research focuses on the human language faculty as a cognitive and neurological system. He is known for work on the neurobiology of language, real-time sentence processing, and language evolution. He advocates comparative evolutionary studies of cognition, argues against tabula rasa models, and favors computational theories of mind.
Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.
