This study seeks to bring novel insights into the nature of the relationship between the psychological (subjective) level of describing individual cognition and the intersubjective level at which language operates. More specifically, it focuses on advancing the overall understanding by clarifying the link between individual mental representations of language users and public meaning of linguistic expressions. Building on the theoretical work by Vosgerau & Petersen (2015), this study looks into practical grounds for the thesis that rich structures of individuals’ representations overlap in the sense that they share a common core. In other words, whether public meaning can be conceived of as a generalisation from individual mental representations.

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To test the thesis with language users (here, German respondents), a novel explanatory method is introduced - Concept Explication Tool (Sutanovac & Vosgerau, forthcoming). Within CET, the, aforementioned, link is established by NSM-frames (situated semantic explications) as a productive format for describing both mental representations and (linguistic) meaning (after Barsalou 1992; and Goddard 2012). In the context of everyday interaction, NSM-frames are intended to represent the cognitive reality of ordinary language users. In this sense, they stand for prototypical cognitive scenarios that serve as a standard reference point linking a concept together with prototypical thoughts associated with it and with its everyday (language) use.  

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The central idea underlying CET is that of an integrated empirical means for explicating and modeling meaning creation in ordinary language, at different levels of granularity. This particular study focused on demonstrating the explanatory-modeling potential of CET at the lower level of granularity, i.e. with the meaning of smaller units. Namely, words on the linguistic level and concepts on the mental level (belonging to three distinct classes of German abstract nouns denoting complex emotions, mental processes and social relations), for which the link between public meaning and individual mental representations has rarely been systematically discussed and empirically investigated. Thus, making this a valuable contribution to resolving one of the longstanding problems of systematically relating the intersubjective (public) meaning to the content of individual mental representation (subjective level of representing entities), thus far, especially in the Gricean tradition, restricted to the meaning of utterances of whole sentences.

 

 References:

 

Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. In A. Lehrer & E. F. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization (pp. 21–74). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Goddard, C. (2012). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach. In Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis. (459-484). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sutanovac, V & Vosgerau, G. (Forthcoming). Abstract Concepts: From Conceptualisation & Processing to Structure & Modeling (via NSM-frames)  

Vosgerau, G. & Petersen, W. (2015). The Relation Between Cognitive and Linguistic Structures. Proceedings of the Conference “EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science”, Torino, Italy, September 25-27, 2015.