Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

FUNCTION, COGNITION, AND LAYERED CLAUSE STRUCTURE 41
in order to describe the skill. If we do that, all animals possess the concept
“food”. Again, it may be regarded as merely a terminological issue — but
there is a risk that discussion on human conceptualization will be muddled up
by such a broad use.
As an example, Langacker’s cognitive grammar (1987b, 1991) understands
meaning in terms of conceptualization, providing a range of subtle and
convincing examples of how “objectivist semantics” is insufficient and human
mental structures are necessary to understand meaning. There is also a mental
dimension with respect to speech sounds: it is not the physical sounds, but the
way the human speaker organizes sounds that matter in linguistic structure.
From this, Langacker concludes that the expression side of language is part of
the semantic subdomain (1987b: 78–79): it deals with “sound concepts”, and
these are part of the general domain of conceptualization that constitutes the
area of semantics.
I think this is a case of the confusion I described above: if we have the
word expression mother and the semantic content ‘mother’, we need a sense
of the word “concept” according to which it is only the content side which
involves a real concept. In the absence of such a sense, we cannot tell the
difference between the expression and the content side of language: there is no
reason why one concept is more contentful than the other. What is involved on
the expression side, more specifically on the level of phonology, is the ability
to make a certain range of perceptual distinctions as a precondition for
reacting appropriately to them (as a moth can perceptually distinguish the
clicks of a bat and react accordingly). Categorial perception is, of course, a
distant relative of conceptualization proper, but the central theoretical basis of
a semantic theory should not encompass both on an equal footing. The narrow
sense I shall call “concept-cognitive”, and the broad sense “neuro-cognitive”.
4. Functional and cognitive perspectives on meaning
Linguistic meaning has always been understood primarily in conceptual
terms, apart from the time of the invasion of formal logic in linguistics from
the 1970s onward. In seeing linguistic meaning in terms of conceptualization,
cognitive linguistics therefore has tradition on its side (cf. also Geeraerts
1992). And with respect to the types of meaning that everybody considers
basic, I think this tradition is wholly sound: the feature of human language