Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

knowledge, and non-understanding, etc.
FROM VISION TO COGNITION 69
sikta på ‘aim at’ intention
framsynt ‘far-sighted’ attitude to knowledge
vara blind ‘being blind’ inability to understand
Visual expressions may thus be employed to express very many aspects of
cognition where “knowledge” is perhaps only one of the most abstract concepts.
My last comment concerns the conceptual analysis of vision. Sweetser
seems to consider ‘sight’ as a primitive concept. This is somewhat inadequate
as a semantic analysis. Sight presupposes the ability to perceive light. Thus,
we use the expression he could no longer see to refer to a situation where an
individual has lost the ability to perceive light. In my semantic field analysis
(section 4), I will accordingly understand the concept ‘light’ as more basic
than ‘sight’ or ‘seeing’.
3. Aim of the study
Taking the critical remarks above as a starting-point, my aim was to explore
what different aspects of cognition are expressed metaphorically, or polysemically,
in Swedish by the aid of expressions connected with visual perception.
The study was not restricted to verbs but included all kinds of lexemes
connected with light. The investigation was entirely based on information in
Swedish dictionaries concerned with synonymy.
The difference between the present study and studies by writers such as
Viberg (1980) is that, while Viberg’s interest is focused on the Swedish
expressions from a typological point of view, my study is clearly more
language-specific with the ultimate aim of formulating some hypotheses
which can be investigated in other languages.
4. The semantic field of visual perception
What follows in this section is an attempt to understand how language structures
the domain of visual perception. I would like to characterize my analysis
as “folk semantic”, in that it makes an abstraction away from much of the