Re: Jackendoff's "Semantic (?) Structures"

Oh, so I was a cognitivist and I didn't know it !
Thanks for bringing to light unknown aspects of my
personality ;-)

Anyway, I think that even if someone doesn't agree
with Jackendoff, this book (Semantic Structures) is
quite interesting. The difficult thing is like
usually, to know where the author wants to get to, so
I read the Epilogue to have an idea of it. I also
noticed the idea (I already read somewhere before)
that the brain handles with primitives it disposes of
ever before having any world experience (J. calls it
the "basic machinery"). As an example, he points out
that iterative (repetition of an event) is,
essentially, the same primitive concept as plural. One
applies to events, the other one to things. That's not
bad. Now I really have to READ this book (up till now,
I just jumped from one chapter to another, being eager
to fetch the main ideas).

I think J. refers to Talmy here and there (also to
Marr, who seemed to have had a very exciting idea
about spatial and structural representation of an
object, put in a linguistic way). I also heard of
Lakoff before, but never read anything from him. How
much remains to read before I die !

--- John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...> wrote:
> Philippe Caquant wrote:
>
>
> Your statements point out quite clearly the flaw in
> approaching semantics
> from a syntactic perspective, as Jackendoff does.
> IMHO, the only group of
> linguists so far who are on the right track when it
> comes to semantics are
> the cognitivists such as Leonard Talmy, Gilles
> Fauconnier and George
> Lakoff.  Talmy's 2-volume set "Toward a Cognitive
> Semantics" has been
> extremely influential in my own conlanging efforts.
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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