Concepts in the Brain: The View From Cross-linguistic Diversity

Abstract

For most native English speakers, the meanings of words like “blue,” “cup,” “stumble,” and “carve” seem quite natural. Research in semantic typology has shown, however, that they are far from universal. Although the roughly 6,500 languages around the world have many similarities in the sorts of concepts they encode, they also vary greatly in how they partition particular conceptual domains, how they map those domains onto syntactic categories, which distinctions they force speakers to habitually track, and how deeply they weave certain notions into the fabric of their grammar. Although these insights from semantic typology have had a major impact on psycholinguistics, they have mostly been neglected by the branch of cognitive neuroscience that studies how concepts are represented, organized, and processed in the brain. In this book, David Kemmerer exposes this oversight and demonstrates its significance. He argues that as research on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge moves forward, it should expand its purview to embrace the broad spectrum of cross-linguistic variation in the lexical and grammatical representation of meaning. Otherwise, it will never be able to achieve a truly comprehensive, pan-human account of the cortical underpinnings of concepts. The book begins by elaborating the different perspectives on concepts that currently exist in semantic typology and cognitive neuroscience. Then it shows how a synthesis of these approaches can lead to a more unified understanding of several domains of meaning—specifically, objects, actions, and spatial relations. Finally, it explores multiple issues involving the interplay between language, cognition, and consciousness.