1. Cognitively grounded semantics1
What is it that you know when you know a language? Certainly you
know many words of the language—its lexicon; and you know how to
put the words together in an appropriate way—its syntax. More importantly,
you know the meaning of the words and what they mean when
put together into sentences. In other words, you know the semantics of
the language. If you do not master the meaning of the words you are
using, there is no point in knowing the syntax. Therefore, as regards
communication, semantic knowledge is more fundamental than syntactic.
(I am not saying the syntax does not contribute to the meaning
of a sentence, only that without knowledge of the meanings of the basic
words there is no need for syntax.)
In Gärdenfors (2014), I connect the semantics of various forms of
communication to other cognitive processes, in particular concept formation,
perception, attention, and memory. As Jackendoff (1983: 3)
puts it: “[T]o study semantics of natural language is to study cognitive psychology”. My theoretical starting point is that our minds organize
the information that is involved in these processes in a format that
can be modelled in geometric or topological terms—namely in conceptual
spaces. The theory of conceptual space was presented in an earlier
book (Gärdenfors 2000). My general semantic program is to show that
by using conceptual spaces, a unifi ed theory of word meanings can be
developed.