A Taxonomy of Cognitive Semantics

Talmy, Leonard

Cognitive semantics is a relatively new field whose central concern is how language structures conceptual content. This book aims to approach the field comprehensively and outline its main contours. It both summarizes previous research and presents novel analyses. The main issues it covers range from concept structuring mechanisms, through crosslinguistic contrasts of concepts, to relations across cognitive faculties. Along the way, it examines communication systems, including gesture and signed language; diachronic change from long to short-term; differences between universal, typological, and language-specific features; ten conceptual categories represented by closed-class forms; and tropes as a form of "constructive discrepancy".