Source: pixbay.com
In this post I am again going to present a theory that tries to combine linguistic approaches with cognitive models, the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM). As the name suggests it consists of lexical concepts (a component of linguistic knowledge, in LCCM these are the units of semantic structure) and cognitive models (conceptual knowledge which is also non-linguistic, in LCCM these are the means of conceptual structure). This post is based on the paper “Semantic representation in LCCM Theory”, published by Vyvyan Evans, a linguist, in 2009 as part of the book “New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics” which was also edited by Vyvyan Evans together with Stéphanie Pourcel.
Similar to the LASS theory LCCM assumes that there are two different systems for representation: a linguistic system and a conceptual system (which is similar to what's called “situated simulation system” in LASS). Evans argues, that the linguistic system evolved (partially) to facilitate the conceptual system (especially with regard to communication) and therefore to improve its efficiency. The linguistic system is much younger that the conceptual system (in terms of evolution) and gave humans a huge evolutionary advantage, looking at all possibilities it opened (e.g. storing knowledge in the form of stories). In a nutshell LCCM says that semantic representation in the linguistic and conceptual systems interact, so humans can communicate (linguistically, so by using a language). The lexical concept and the cognitive model form together a new level of representation, the semantic representation.
One view in cognitive linguistics suggests, that a central feature of language is that it expresses concepts divided into two subsystems: the grammatical subsystem and the lexical subsystem. If you have a sentence like “A waiter served the customers” all the forms in bold are associated with the grammatical subsystem and all the forms in italics are associated with the lexical subsystem. The difference between those two systems is, that the grammatical subsystem give information about the structural aspects, while the lexical subsystem gives information about details concerning the nature of the involved actors, scenes, relationships between them and so on. Evans argues, that this distinction in content coming from language relates to a distinction in content associated with the linguistic system (and lexical concepts) and the conceptual system (and cognitive models), he speaks of linguistic content and conceptual content. Linguistic content is content that is encoded by a lexical concept (I have to admit that reading is kind of confusing, since Evans introduces many new terms for concepts that (in my opinion) already have a name), basically it is information that you can get through the grammatical structure of a phrase. Conceptual content on the other hand is information that you primarily get through perceptions and subjective experience (how he describes it sounds a lot like embodiment and reading the rest of the papers shows, that this theory was influenced by embodied cognition). While linguistic content encodes knowledge in a rather abstract way (“highly schematic semantic”, as he describes it), the knowledge in conceptual content is more concrete rooted in perception (“richly detailed perceptual”, as he writes).
A semantic structure is modelled using lexical concepts. Lexical concepts encode linguistic content, which means that it is put into a format that can be “shown to the world”. A conceptual structure is modelled as a cognitive model, which (as Evan puts it) is basically a simulator which can fetch and re-run previously received perceptions.
The interaction between the systems that are related to these structures is a key feature in knowledge representation in humans: the linguistic system interacts with the conceptual system in order to access conceptual knowledge. This, e.g. allows concepts to be shared among individuals, which is indeed a huge evolutionary advance since it allows humans to very easily adapt to their environments. According to the LCCM theory the interaction happens between open-class lexical concepts (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs belong into this class, in the LCCM theory this class is related to the conceptual content) and the conceptual system at so-called “access sites”. The purpose of such an access site is to integrate the linguistic and conceptual content and to provide an integrated simulation, that retrieves the meaning of a concept as result.
The LCCM Theory assumes a separation between the evolutionary older conceptual system and the more recent linguistic system. Each system has a different type of “semantic” representations: the lexical concept and the cognitive model, while the first one is associated with linguistic content that is encoded by lexical concepts and therefore highly schematic, the latter is associated with content that is encoded by cognitive models and therefore a highly detailed (perceptual information). A subset of lexical concepts (open-class lexical concepts) serves as access site for facilitating the interaction between linguistic and conceptual content and spawning simulations, which integrate linguistic content and conceptual content.
What the LCCM theory basically assumes is, that the linguistic system provides a control function, which allows to access the conceptual representations for communication purposes.
