In his comparison of cognitive linguistics with other major linguistic theories, Taylor (2002:186 ff.) makes a distinction between three general approaches to linguistic meaning. These approaches differ in their claims about the actual locus and hence the nature of linguistic meaning and can roughly be assigned to the three endpoints of the semiotic triangle:
Figure 1: Three approaches to meaning based on the semiotic triangle
The first major approach to linguistic meaning to be illustrated here is the language-world approach, which is situated at the lower right corner of the triangle. According to this approach, the locus of linguistic meaning resides in the relationship between linguistic expressions and some state of affairs in the external world. According to the direction of
this relation, the language-world approach makes a distinction between a semasiological
perspective (from language to the world; which states of affairs can be designated by a given linguistic expression?) and an onomasiological perspective (from the world to language; which linguistic expressions can be used to designate a given state of affairs?).1
1 This distinction between a semasiological and an onomasiological approach is also quite prevalent in
General Terminology Theory (see Arntz et al. 62009:189).
The general idea of matching linguistic expressions with states of affairs in the world shows a strong correlation with truth-conditional semantics, which claims that meaning equals the truth conditions of a proposition expressed by a sentence with regard to its correspondence with some state of affairs in the world. As such, it stands in the tradition of the objectivist paradigm discussed in the previous chapter. While cognitive linguistics recognizes the huge relevance of this relation between linguistic expressions and phenomena in the world for any comprehensive theory of meaning, it is claimed that there are several problems involved in reducing the nature of linguistic meaning to this relation alone. The most relevant problem is probably that meaning cannot be exhaustively characterized by reducing it to the relation between expressions and their referents. For example, as Taylor (2002:189) convincingly claims, knowledge of the word carburettor
involves much more than the competence to identify a carburettor under the bonnet of a car, e.g. knowledge about its functional relation to an internal combustion engine, about types of carburettors, their size, weight, etc. This knowledge, which may be more or less central to characterizing the meaning of carburettor, (and which may have to be evoked in a given translational context) cannot be properly accounted for within the language-world approach and is normally assigned to the broader field of pragmatics. A second important objection raised by CL against absolutizing the language-world approach is that truth- conditionally equivalent propositions (describing the same state of affairs) can generally be linguistically encoded in various ways. As Taylor (ibid.) points out, from a truth- conditional perspective the sentences Someone stole her diamonds from the Princess and
The Princess was robbed of her diamonds express the same proposition but the situation is conceptualized in different ways in the two sentences. By merely matching the two sentences with the state of affairs described, we would, for example, miss the semantic (and hence perhaps translationally relevant!) difference between the active and the passive construction and between the two verbs rob and steal (ibid.). Cognitive linguistics, on the other hand, captures these semantic differences with the important concept of linguistic
construal (see 4.5.1). This concept operates at a much finer-grained level than formalist approaches and can explain, from a cognitively plausible perspective, why the two sentences above are semantically non-equivalent although they both, according to truth- conditional semantics, describe the same “state of affairs”.
The second important approach to the study of linguistic meaning is the so-called
language-internal approach, which is situated at the lower left corner of the semiotic triangle. According to this approach, linguistic meaning resides in the relations between linguistic expressions within a language (Taylor 2002:186, 190). These relations can be described from a paradigmatic perspective (relations between different expressions, such as synonymy, heteronymy, antonymy, hyponymy, etc.) or from a syntagmatic perspective (relations between items co-occurring within an expression, such as collocational preferences, semantic clash, pleonasm, etc.). It should be obvious that this approach has its roots in Saussurean structural linguistics, according to which linguistic signs have no autonomous meaning but are only made meaningful by their relation to other signs in a given sign system. Again, cognitive linguistics recognizes the relevance of these language- internal relations for a comprehensive characterization of meaning but, as with the language-world approach, it claims that linguistic meaning cannot be reduced to these relations alone. According to Taylor (ibid.:192), when meaning is equated with relations between linguistic expressions, “the semantic structure of a language becomes a vast calculus of language-internal relations, which makes no contact at all with the way speakers conceptualize the world”. In other words, the language-internal approach cannot explain how speakers of a language “gain a toe-hold into the conceptual system” (ibid.). For example, the hypernym-hyponym relation between engine and combustion engine or the antonymic relation between hot and cold are certainly important in the semantic characterization of these linguistic units but they do not give an indication of the actual conceptual content of these expressions.2
2 Structural linguistics has informed various linguistically oriented approaches to translation (e.g. Schreiber
1993, Albrecht 2005) that show a very high internal coherence and possess an equally high explanatory power with regard to numerous linguistic aspects of translation. However, with the cognitive turn in translation studies and the subsequent development of cognitive theories of translation (see Halverson 2010a, 2010b), it may be time to shift the focus from such structuralist approaches and to assess the potential that cognitive linguistic theories hold for the field of translation.
Finally, the conceptualist approach, which is situated at the top corner of the semiotic triangle, claims that the meaning of linguistic expressions can be equated with conceptualizations in the minds of language users (ibid.:187). According to Langacker (1987:97), the rationale for such a conceptualist approach to meaning is that “[m]eaning is a mental phenomenon that must eventually be described with reference to cognitive processing”. The conceptualist approach is obviously the approach underlying the cognitive linguistic framework to be illustrated in this chapter. As mentioned above, CL acknowledges the merits of both the language-world and the language-internal approach but it claims that the relations which, in these two approaches, are equated with linguistic meaning are at most symptomatic of this meaning but cannot be taken to characterize it exhaustively (Taylor 2002:190, 192). Also, instead of treating meanings as “objects” (an approach which Sinha (1999:223) calls “reificatory semantics”), cognitive linguistics stresses the dynamic character of meaning construction as a “complex process that takes place at the conceptual level” (Evans/Green 2006:368). In the following sections, I will illustrate in more detail the consequences that the conceptualist approach has for cognitive linguistic and ultimately for corresponding translational accounts of meaning.