Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

CONCEPTUAL ENGINEERING 155
II. a list of parts ordered by their saliences. Salience is the ordering of parts
and wholes according to their relative importance to the meaning of a
term. Langacker does not have this ordering, although it is closely related
to the centrality of domains.
III. a list of wholes ordered by their saliences
Take the lexical unit [KNIFE] as an example, as depicted in Figure 1. [BLADE]
and [HANDLE] are clearly parts of [KNIFE].
[KNIFE] has [SILVERWARE] as a whole: [KNIFE] is one of the parts in
collections making up [SILVERWARE]. But [KNIFE] can also have [CUT] as a
whole, because [KNIFE] can be the agent (TR) part of the cutting process.
Parts and wholes like [BLADE] or [CUT] are themselves described with the
same three elements. Their saliences, as well as the centralities, should be
lexically stored but changed on activation to fit a context where that whole,
part or domain is salient (this mechanism is not included in our immediate
implementation goals).
Of course, just saying that the [BLADE] is a part of [KNIFE] is not sufficient.
We must characterize this part-whole relation closer. For instance, the relative
sizes of the blade and the knife must not deviate outside certain limits. The
relative spatial position of the blade on the knife must also be correct, i.e. the
blade must be correctly attached. There are two possibilities of implementing
these constraints, both involving the predication (below).
Most of the content substance of a lexical unit resides in its domains,
which collectively form its matrix. Typical domains are: color, 3D space,
material, age, temperature, profession, emotion, etc. The matrix of a lexical
unit (like [KNIFE]) allows the unit to involve all these aspects simultaneously
and to be identified as the same entity across the domains (that this spatial
form belongs to that color etc.).
Domains are made up by dimensions. The color domain has three dimensions
(hue, saturation and brightness), while temperature has one dimension.
3D space has three dimensions. Profession and emotion domains probably
have rather abstract dimensions.
The lexical unit predicates in each domain in its matrix. In the spatial
form domain, [KNIFE] predicates a 1D-directed form. In the color domain,
[KNIFE] may predicate a brown color. A predication such as a 1D-directed
form or a semancolor picks a subset of the total number of dimensions in the
domain and attributes values to the dimensions in that subset. For example, a
1D-directed form attributes a value to the spatial extension dimension. 2