WORD GAMES


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COGNITIVE SEMANTICS: ARGUMENT IS WAR

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For the scientist, truth is objective and absolute. The standard theory of truth is the "Correspondence Theory": a statement has an objective meaning, specifying the conditions under which it is true. Truth consists of a direct correspondence between a statement and some state of affairs in the world. A theory of truth entails a theory of Meaning. Linguistics, a social science, seeks to apply the theoretical and methodological principles used by the natural sciences (with physics as the model). These also called empirical sciences depend on the formal sciences (mathematics and logic), which contribute to build the theory of truth already mentioned. According to different theories of meaning, the objective meaning of a sentence is described as the conditions under which this is true or false. Semantics is the study of how linguistic expressions can fit the world directly, without the intervention of human understanding. Meanings are assigned to words without r...
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COGNITIVE SEMANTICS: LOVE IS A JOURNEY (LAKOFF & JOHNSON)

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Strictly speaking, a Conceptual Metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon and, as such, it is not made explicit in everyday language under the form "X stands for Y". Consequently, its realization is achieved through an unconscious process of instantiation, i.e., the projection of the Conceptual Metaphor onto linguistic expressions belonging to specific conceptual fields to refer to other unrelated conceptual domains. Metaphors cover the entire conceptual world we live in and provide extensive inventories of instantiations of the most common conceptual metaphors in English. These examples, however copious, do not demonstrate the actual pervasiness and frequency of occurrence of CMs in ordinary language, a phenomenon which can only be perceived in a speaker's discourse not biased by any previous knowledge of the theory under analysis.  This is primarily what we attempt to achieve inductively in this study, namely, to demonstrate the actual relevance of CMs in the stru...
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