Cognitive semantics
The techniques native to cognitive semantics are typically used in lexical studies such as those put forth by Leonard Talmy, George Lakoff and Dirk Geeraerts.
The intension provides an interlocutor with the necessary and sufficient conditions that let a thing qualify as a member of some lexical unit's extension.
One proposal is to treat in order to explain category structure in terms of nodes in a knowledge network.
[citation needed] Cognitive semanticists argue that truth-conditional semantics is unduly limited in its account of full sentence meaning.
That is to say, it is limited to indicative sentences, and does not seem to offer any straightforward or intuitive way of treating (say) commands or expressions.
By contrast, cognitive semantics seeks to capture the full range of grammatical moods by also making use of the notions of framing and mental spaces.
Along these lines, cognitive semantics argues that compositionality can only be intelligible if pragmatic elements like context and intention are taken into consideration.
For example, the notion of restaurant is associated with a series of concepts, like food, service, waiters, tables, and eating.
[1] These rich-but-contingent associations cannot be captured by an analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, yet they still seem to be intimately related to our understanding of "restaurant".
However, linguists have found that language users regularly apply the terms "boy" and "girl" in ways that go beyond mere semantic features.
[1] This fact suggests that there is a latent frame, made up of cultural attitudes, expectations, and background assumptions, which is part of word meaning.
Frame semantics, then, seeks to account for these puzzling features of lexical items in some systematic way.
Third, cognitive semanticists argue that truth-conditional semantics is incapable of dealing adequately with some aspects of the meanings at the level of the sentence.
[1] Finally, with the frame-semantic paradigm's analytical tools, the linguist is able to explain a wider range of semantic phenomena than they would be able to with only necessary and sufficient conditions.
Philosopher of language John Searle explains the latter by asking readers to consider sentences like "The cat is on the mat".
An alternate strain of Fillmore's analysis can be found in the work of Ronald Langacker, who makes a distinction between the notions of profile and base.
[1] A major divide in the approaches to cognitive semantics lies in the puzzle surrounding the nature of category structure.
As mentioned in the previous section, semantic feature analyses fall short of accounting for the frames that categories may have.
An alternative proposal would have to go beyond the minimalistic models given by classical accounts, and explain the richness of detail in meaning that language speakers attribute to categories.
In a related vein, George Lakoff, following the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, noted that some categories are only connected to one another by way of family resemblances.
When these aspects collectively cluster together, they form a prototypical case of what it means to be a mother, but nevertheless they fail to outline the category crisply.
Variations upon the central meaning are established by convention by the community of language users, and the resulting set of instances, many connected to the center by a single shared trait, are reminiscent of a wheel with a hub and spokes.
Moreover, speakers would tend to want to exclude from the concept of bachelor certain false positives, such as those adult unmarried males that don't bear much resemblance to the ideal: i.e., the Pope, or Tarzan.
Moreover, sentence meanings may be dependent upon propositional attitudes: those features that are relative to someone's beliefs, desires, and mental states.
[4] However, by at least one line of argument, truth-conditional semantics seems to be able to capture the meaning of belief-sentences like "Frank believes that the Red Sox will win the next game" by appealing to propositional attitudes.
It appears to be the case that, if our project is to look at how linguistic strings convey different semantic content, we must first catalogue what cognitive processes are being used to do it.
According to linguists William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, there are four broad cognitive abilities that play an active part in the construction of construals.
