Lakoff's Cognitive Semantics And Edelman's Conceptual Systems Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 247):

With this background, Lakoff attempts to mount a structure for cognitive semantics. Notice first that meaning is already based in embodiment by means of image schemas, kinæsthetic schemas, metonyms, and the categorical relations that underlie metaphor. But this is not enough: Language is supposed to be characterised by symbolic models. These are models that pair linguistic information with the cognitive models that themselves make up a preexisting conceptual system. In as much as preexisting conceptual models are already embodied through their link to bodily and social experience, this link is not an arbitrary one. In contrast, the attribution of such a linkage to generative grammar in terms of mental representations is arbitrary; it is made from on high by the grammarian.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, Lakoff's cognitive models are meanings of language construed of experience of the non-semiotic domain by processes of consciousness.  Edelman's 'pre-existing conceptual system', on the other hand, is the organisation of perceptual meanings — construed of experience of the non-semiotic domain — into systems.  The relation between perceptual meanings and linguistic meanings is one of identity, whereby linguistic values are encoded by reference to perceptual tokens, and perceptual tokens are decoded by reference to linguistic values.

On the cognitive semantics model, human cognition ("intelligence") made human language possible, whereas on the SFL model, human language made human cognition ("intelligence") possible.

Objectivist Cognitive Science Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 67):

The cognitive position was to adopt notions derived from logical and formal analysis, putting an emphasis on syntax. In this view, the mind, like a computer, is organised by rules and operates by mental representations. Meanings or semantics are supposed to arise by mapping these rules onto classically categorisable events and objects. Unlike behaviourism, this view allowed one to look into the mind but then described it as if it were a formal system. This description floated more or less free of the detailed structure of the brain. The semantic mapping of that description onto the world is objectivist; things and events are unequivocally described as classical categories.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, in emphasising syntax, cognitivism  takes the perspective of the lower level of symbolic abstraction on two dimensions, emphasising structure over system (axis), and emphasising form over function (stratification).  In doing so, it downplays both choice (system) and purpose (function).

In mapping its description onto the world, cognitivism takes a transcendent perspective on meaning, since it assumes a prior discriminated world onto which meanings can be mapped. In contrast, SFL theory takes the perspective that all discriminations of the world are meanings — properties of semiotic systems — construed of experience, and that meaning is intersubjective.