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Leonard Talmy, Linguistics, University at Buffalo speaks about "How Language Structures Concepts"
ABSTRACT:
As a fundamental design feature, language has two subsystems, the open-class (lexical) and the closed-class (grammatical). These subsystems
perform complementary functions. In the total meaning expressed by any portion of discourse, the open-class forms contribute the majority of the content, while the closed-class forms determine the majority of the structure. Further, across languages, all closed-class forms are undergreat semantic constraint: They represent only certain concepts and categories of concepts, but not others. Closed-class representations accordingly appear to constitute the fundamental conceptual structuring
system of language. This talk will examine some of the main conceptual categories and member concepts represented by closed-class forms; the
properties that distinguish such closed-class representations from open-class representations; and the conceptual structuring function performed by this organization of language. This linguistic structure will be brought into relief by contrasting it with the structure found in
another cognitive system, visual perception. It will be seen that language and vision, along with other cognitive systems, each have certain
structural properties of their own and others that they share, in what I term the overlapping systems model of cognitive organization.
BIO:
Leonard Talmy is the Director of the Center for Cognitive Science, Professor of Linguistics, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He received his Ph.D.in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since then, he has taught in Hamburg, Rome, and Moscow (the latter two as a Fulbright Fellow) and at Stanford, Georgetown and UC Berkeley. He has done extended research at Stanford on the Language Universals Project, at the UCLA
Neuropsychiatric Institute with language-impaired children, and at the University of California at San Diego in cognitive science at the Center for Human Information Processing. And he was the Coordinator of the Cognitive Science Program at the University of California at Berkeley for six years. His broader research interests cover cognitive linguistics, the
properties of conceptual organization, and cognitive theory. His more specific interests within linguistics center on natural-language
semantics, including: typologies and universals of semantic structure; the relationship between semantic structure and formal linguistic structures -- lexical, morphological, and syntactic; and the relation of this
material to diachrony, discourse, development, impairment, and culture. Additional specializations are in American Indian and Yiddish linguistics. He is the author of a two-volume set with MIT Press (2000): Toward a
Cognitive Semantics -- volume 1: Concept Structuring Systems; volume 2: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Previously published articles include "The Relation of Grammar to Cognition", "Force Dynamics in
Language and Cognition", "How Language Structures Space", "Fictive Motion in Language and `Ception'", "Lexicalization Patterns", and "The Representation of Spatial Structure in Spoken and Signed Languages: a Neural Model". He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in its 2002 inaugural selection of Fellows. He is presently on the editorial
board of the journal Cognitive Linguistics and of the journal of Discourse and Cognition (Korea); on the advisory board of English Linguistics (journal of the Linguistic Society of Japan), of the Journal of Cognitive Science (Korea), and of the Journal of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences; on the governing board of the Bolzano International Schools in
Cognitive Analysis (BISCA); and a corresponding member of the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology (CREA) in Paris, France.