| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000)
Fiscal Year 1992: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1991: ¥300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 1990: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
If we study the concrete uses of a language expression (of a word, of a phrase and so on), there is no clear meaning unit which uniquely corresponds to that expression. The meaning of a language expression is rather scattered in various ways on its widest sphere.
For the purpose of describing these meaning variations I have collected language expressions from a text-corpus. And I analyzed the meaning variations in those collections. (The direct object of the description and analysis was: a german adjective "empfindlich" and a pair of german adjectives "schwer" and "leicht".) On the basis of that analysis I then came to a conclusion, that inspite of the various possible ways of understanding the expressions, there are abstract cores of meanings, which uniquely represent the meanings of the expressions.
These abstract cores of meanings are what I call "the language specific meaning". This language specific meaning does not depend directly on the meaning at the level of knowledge in our cog
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nition, but is "language specific". It represents rather a "complex of relations" at very abstract levels.
But if we use the language expressions in communication, they are not understood at these abstract levels. We can mean very concrete, detailed and/or vivid things/matters with these language expressions which possess only their abstract meaning cores. On the assumption that language expressions have very abstract meaning in their cores, there must be a rich and powerful cognitive system at work to make up our communications which meet an agreed standard of intelligibility. The knowledge which constitutes that cognitive system must not only be a symbolic and conceptual one but also one of a more soft and flexible character (such as images, metaphors or associations).
From these observations, I have confirmed that the language specific meaning and therefore the natural language semantics has its own characteristic status in our whole cognitive system. Thanks to the interactions between the language specific meaning and our cognitive knowledge, there can be that understanding of variations in language expressions, which are the very source of the richness in our whole life with language. Less
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