Syntactics, Cognition and Compositional Semantics

Abstract

The object of the article is word semantics and its realization in the immediate context. The goal and the innovative component of the study is the analysis of the problem in the light of cognitive linguistics. We proceed from the assumption that the lexical meaning of a word contains a component responsible for its entry into the text. This component involves searching for lexical partners of the word in the syntagmatic chain. The semes participating in this process are actualized - they must get into the bright field of con-sciousness. The classical manifestation of this connection is the soalled semantic agreement ( собака лает ‘a dog barks’, бурый медведь ‘a brown bear’, волосы дыбом ‘hair (stands) on end’, etc.). We use examples from Russian literature to demonstrate that when a non-typical (non-standard) word combination is formed, the concepts get intersected (mixed). The examples, such as самопишущий костюм ‘a self-writing suit’ or жаркая робость ‘hot timidity’, expand a person’s cognitive horizons making the individual accustomed to a different (virtual) reality. The background and guarantor of this combinatorial process is the so-called “common sense” based on the native speaker’s previous experience. The result of the study is the presentation of five special situations manifesting the relationship between the word and its text partners: polysemantic words, phraseological units, introduced (embedded) meanings, additional connotations and a surprise effect. The author provides examples of the pressure (influence) of text memory on the speaker when selecting a necessary word and considers the idea of the predicative nature of the compatibility of lexemes. The article justifies the emergence of compositional semantics as a special direction in modern linguistics and demonstrates some of its results (based on the Russian language).

Keywords

• cognition
• syntactics
• compositional semantics
• lexical meaning
• word compatibility
• connotation