政大語言學/英語教學學術工作坊
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講者：Professor Maria Mercedes Piñango / Department of Linguistics, Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University, USA
題目：Where do Word Meanings Live and What are They Made of?
摘要：
The meaning of a word or a sentence is a conceptual construal of the human mind which reveals these properties: it can be expressed (written/signed/spoken forms); it can be combined with other meanings; its expression is not language dependent; it connects our thoughts with the world as we construe it in our mind; it serves as a vehicle for drawing inferences from what is linguistically expressed; and it is not readily available through conscious awareness. This talk is about one possible model of the conceptual structure space that captures these properties, the Multidimensional Space (MdS) (e.g., Piñango, 2019; 2023, Stern & Piñango, 2026).
I motivate this approach to the neurocognitive basis of linguistic meaning by exploring two kinds of cases widely observed in lexical polysemy (1) cases where one pronunciation is associated with multiple components of the same conceptual “object” e.g., English ‘smoke’, and (2) cases where one pronunciation is associated with multiple partly dissociable senses which are nonetheless construable as a conceptual “cline” e.g., English ‘have’ in the location-possession domain. The result of this discussion is the possibility of a meaning system that is built of interrelated, heteromodal, algebraic structures – i.e., lexico-conceptual structures (LCSs, e.g., Jackendoff, 1983, 1990). These structures are not isolated, in the mental lexicon, but operate instead within semantic memory, a long-term memory space. The space that supports LCSs is, the Multidimensional Space (MdS), a parametrized, continuous, heteromodal cognitive construct out of which lexico-conceptual structures are generated induced from the individual’s life experience on the basis of the combination of context-independent conceptual functions. The resulting LCSs are what we understand as lexical meanings.
Throughout, the talk brings to bear evidence from diverse methodological sources –including naturalistic, introspectional, real-time processing and imaging at both psychological and neurological levels. This is what allows us to explore linguistic meaning not only as part of an abstract mentalistic system, but also in its dynamic form, as it supports composition during real time communicative situations thus offering a window into how individuals construe their experience of the world.
References
Jackendoff, R. (1983) Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1990) Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Piñango, M. M. (2019), Concept Composition during Language Processing: Two Case Studies and a Model. In: The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Applied Linguistics. Routledge, pp. 624–644.
Piñango, M. M. (2023). Solving the Elusiveness of Word Meanings: Two Arguments for a Continuous Meaning Space for Language. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Language and Computation. 6(1), 1– 20.
Stern, M. C., & Piñango, M. M. (2026). Contextual modulation of language comprehension in a dynamic neural model of lexical meaning. Cognition, 266, 106336.
時間：114年11月27日星期四中午12點30分至下午2點
地點：國立政治大學季陶樓340309外語學院口譯教室
主辦：國立政治大學語言學研究所
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