In this "over the section borders" seminar, Prof. Diodato will present her approach to lexical semantics, which integrates ideas from structuralism, dialogism, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and cognitive semiotics, as can be seen from the abstract below. Hosts are the divisions for Cognitive Semiotics and English Linguistics. After the talk, we are taking the guest to dinner. If you wish to join, let Jordan know no later than Dec 8.

In recent decades, Cognitive Linguistics has turned the spotlight back on the symbolic function of language and, in polemic with the autonomist assumptions of Generativism, also denounced the inconsistencies of traditional linguistic categories (cf. Langacker, 1991). However, an influential current of Cognitive Semantics, instead of striving for an integration between semiotics and cognitive research to unravel persistent epistemological and methodological aporias, has indulged in a “neuromaniac” drift, resulting in Lakoff’s approach of frames neural structures, which reduces the speaking subject to an automaton subjugated by a “cognitive unconscious” (Lakoff, 2008; cf. Diodato, 2023). This distorts the very conception of communication and the understanding of the “game” of langue. On the one hand, communication is anchored to an old (mostly behaviorist) code model, while language and words are reduced to their neural substrates, enclosing all semantic experience in the connections that take place in an impersonal brain.

As an antidote I aim to revisit the twentieth-century debate on the discursive/enunciative function (Jakobson, 1963; Benveniste, 1966; cf. Paolucci, 2020) hinged on the intuition of the “otherness” of language – that is, both being-with-the-other and being-for-the-other (Coseriu, 1967). This perspective could lead to the elaboration of a lexical semantics that, aware of its own aporias, relies on a conception of the word as a multifaceted enunciative instance (Brandt, 2020), whose meaning extends far beyond the boundaries of the system and presupposes in any case a sediment of “known values” relating to the Lebenswelt (Sonesson, 2015). In the wake of Frame Semantics, I will argue that a word contains not only the memory of its sense and denotation, but also morphosyntactic information, as well as instructions for its use in communicative practices and an ideological load which exhibits the speaker's “orientation” towards the world (Bachtin, 1981). Such a conception could help bypass the dilemma of an upstream choice between Dictionary and Encyclopaedia (Eco, 1984), acknowledging the intrinsic dialogicity and intersubjectivity of language. Moreover, it could also avoid the caesura between semantics and pragmatics, averting the risks of both an omnipotent semantics and, conversely, of a conceptualization of pragmatics (Violi, 2015).

Bakhtin, M.M., (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. by M. Holquist; C. Emerson, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Benveniste, E. (1966), Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris: Gallimard.

Brandt, P.A. (2020), Cognitive Semiotics. Signs, Mind and Meaning, London-New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Coseriu, E. (1967), “Der Mensch und seine Sprache”, in H. Haag & E.P. Möhres (Hrgs), Ursprung und Wesen des Menschen, Tübingen, pp. 67–69.

Diodato, F. (2023), “Chomsky and Lakoff: from Cognition to Language and Politics, and Back”, RIFL (2022) SFL, pp. 92-104.

Eco, U. (1984), Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio, Bompiani, Milano.

Jakobson, R. (1963), Essais de linguistique générale, Paris: Minuit.

Lakoff, G. (2008), «The Neural Theory of Metaphor», in Gibbs, R. W. jr., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 17-38. 

Langacker, R. W. (1991), Concept, Image, and Symbol. The Cognitive Basis of Grammar, Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Paolucci, C., (2020), Persona. Soggettività nel linguaggio e Semiotica dell’enunciazione, Milano: Bompiani.

Sonesson, G. (2015), ‘Le jeu de la valeur et du sens’, in A. Biglari (ed), Valeurs: Aux fondements de la sémiotique, pp. 85-101, Paris: L’Harmattian.

Violi, P. (2015), “Global and local: Encyclopedic meaning revisited”, Semiotica, 2015 - 10.1515/sem-2015-0023.