Cognition and Language: reflexions on meaning and form

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Dra. Nara M. Figueiredo - Unicamp

Meaning En-action

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Dr. Raquel Krempel - Unifesp

Notes on linguistic meaning

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Prof. Dr. César Meurer - UFABC

Embodied semantics & Sign-based semantics

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The debate on how linguistic items (words, expressions, sentences) acquire meanings and how these meanings should be understood is of central concern in philosophy and linguistics. According to the semiological principle (Duffley, 2020) we should conceive words as having stable meanings, which can be discovered through observation of their uses. In this roundtable, we will offer critical assessments of sign-based semantics as presented in the book Linguistic Meaning Meets Linguistic Form (2020), including some of its explanatory limits and possible compatibility with embodied semantics and enactivism.

In Notes on linguistic meaning, Raquel Krempel briefly presents the view we are addressing and offers her view on the limits of a semantic theory based on the semiological principle. She critically addresses some ideas of sign-based semantics, and argues that the principle can lead to artificial descriptions of the meaning of words, such as the preposition for, in attempting to avoid the charge of polysemy. Another issue she raises is that the principle is not always consistently applied. Cases such as the meaning of start, or words with encyclopedic meanings are examples of this limitation.

In Embodied semantics & Sign-based semantics, César Meurer argues that these two approaches may be mutually beneficial if we conceive them as a foundational theory and as a semantic theory, respectively. First, he describes embodied semantics as a research program that conceives the foundations of meaning in terms of embodied simulation. Afterwards, he draws attention to three points (the analysis of for, verbs of positive and negative recall, and causative verbs) where sign-based semantics could find support in such a foundational theory. Finally, he suggests that two pressing challenges currently on the agenda of embodied semantics (abstract language and sentence-level simulations) could be met by sign-based semantics.

In Meaning En-action, Nara Figueiredo distinguishes between methodological and ontological commitments of sign-based semantics. The methodological one is the analysis of corpora and the ontological one is the postulate of mental content. By adopting a linguistic enactivist perspective she proposes that the methodological aspect could be compatible with an enactivist perspective which rests on the notion of stable meaning in action. She presents a conception of meaning as a four-level practice and argues that sign-based semantics doesn’t have to rely on mental content if it takes into account the conception of meaningful material engagement in cognitive archeology and its development into sign-using as an enactive capacity.

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Reference:

Duffley, P. (2020) Linguistic Meaning meets Linguistic Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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