Contextualization and Blending: A Cognitive Linguistics approach to the semantics of in
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Theory and Practice in English Studies (THEPES) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | Digitální knihovna FF MU |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | cognitive linguistics; semantics; prepositions |
| Description | This paper adopts a cognitive pragmatic and a Conceptual Blending approach to the semantics of in. It is argued that pragmatics, with context defined as a composite of surrounding linguistic items and shared world knowledge, can serve as an information processing system that derives the diverse interpretations of in from its proto-scene. The criterion for sense establishment is based on Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor, according to which the meanings in use that can be considered an inferential product of the proto-scene and contextual factors will not be entitled a status of a distinct sense. The analyses have established two senses, ‘physical containment’ and ‘means’, and the other overlapping meanings discussed in previous studies are regarded context-sensitive uses by the above criterion. Furthermore, it is argued that this pragmatic model of meaning processing can position itself as cognitive in that it corresponds to Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), with the details of the present model matches specifically three elements of emergent structure: composition, completion, and elaboration. The implication of the present study is at least two-fold: A context-based pragmatic approach to polysemy, assuming Modified Occam’s Razor as the criterion of sense establishment, is highly parsimonious so can greatly alleviate the problem of sense proliferation. On the other hand, the preposition study can delineate how the context-oriented model of polysemy integrates into Conceptual Blending Theory by carving out the correspondences between details of contextualization and elements of emergent structure, and is hoped to make contribution to cognitive linguistics from a pragmatic point of view. |
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