In this series of seminars I provide an overview of the design features for meaning-construction in language and thought. I argue that the linguistic system evolved in order to provide an executive control system on the evolutionarily antecedent conceptual system. Linguistically-mediated meaning construction arises by virtue of language facilitating access to representations in the conceptual system. After considering the nature of concepts that reside in the conceptual system, I introduce a recent theory of lexical representation and meaning-construction: Access Semantics, also known as the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM Theory; Evans 2009, 2013). I illustrate how the theory accounts for a range of previously intractable semantic phenomena, in terms of language facilitating access to concepts in service of meaning-construction.時間割: 12:30 受付開始
会員(一般・学生共通) |
非会員(一般) |
非会員(学生) |
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参加費 |
無料 |
4,000円 |
2,000円 |
予稿集 |
1,000円 |
1,000円 |
1,000円 |
計 |
1,000円 |
5,000円 |
3,000円 |
In this lecture, I consider the main communicative functions of language, before surveying some of the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in language usage. I then consider this variation as an outcome of an evolutionary process, whereby the envelope of the human communication potential has been steadily expanding. In particular, I consider the evolutionary emergence of the pro-social impulse—what I dub ‘cooperative intelligence’—that most likely led to the emergence of language. And I examine two types of symbolic reference strategies—words-tor-world, and words-to-words—that enabled ancestral humans to cross the symbolic threshold, leading to the emergence of modern-like language, and recursive thought, based on discussion in Evans (2014, 2015). |