linguistic

A VIEW OF LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS

The article presents the programme of 'subjectively'-oriented cognitive semantics. The programme was launched about twenty years ago and has been consistently developed by its author, his co-workers and followers ever since. The tenets of author's cognitive grammar concern the conceptual and subject-oriented nature of meaning, the question of linguistic meanings vis-a-vis the knowledge of the world, and above all the view of meaning as embedded in the network of 'categorial relations'. This programmatic article contains important and still inspiring conceptions of linguistic imagery (or construal), its dimensions, such as the level of specificity (the detail, 'granularity', or resolution) of the image, its scope of predication, the role of compositional paths in interpreting meanings, the notion of 'perspective' and the mental construction of spaces by the conceptualizing and speaking subject.