Comments on Durst’s article

I would like to begin by briefly reviewing the assumptions and hypotheses the NSM approach is predicated on. The goal of this exercise is to understand how these are interrelated, what hinges on every one of them, and what consequences arise from discarding an assumption or disproving a hypothesis. This process defines a number of projects which all agree up to some point and then depart. Prima facie, all of these constitute legitimate avenues of inquiry. My aim is to evaluate the decisions made within the NSM program vis-à-vis these alternatives, and to do so from a particular perspective – that of a field worker dedicated to the study of semantics in Non-Indo-European languages and of a semantic typologist interested in variation and universals of semantic representations across languages. It should be clear from the outset that NSM has made contributions to the crosslinguistic perspective in semantics unsurpassed by those of any other framework (in particular, Goddard & Wierzbicka (eds.) 1994, 2002; Goddard (ed.) 1997) – so my interest should not come as a surprise. NSM takes a mentalist stance – it views meaning as a relation between expressions or utterances and internal representations in the minds of speakers and hearers. As in other mentalist frameworks (e. 'Cognitive Grammar'), the relation is viewed as a symbolic mapping-that is, there is assumed to be a fixed or rule-governed association between expressions and concepts or the like, independent of communicative intentions. This contrasts with the much richer cognitive reality envisioned in interactionist approaches (chiefly, Austin 1962 and Grice 1989) which view meaning as the communicative intentions of rational agents (this has important consequences to which I return shortly). A third perspective that has generated much work in contemporary linguistic semantics, the view of meaning as denotation, i.e., as a relation between utterances and states of affairs in external reality (which may be only imagined, but can still be isolated as 'intentional' correlates of speakers' and hearers' mental states), in the tradition of Carnap, Frege, Montague, Russel, Tarsky, and many others, is routinely dismissed by NSM scholars. Textbook-like expositions of the NSM method (e.g., Goddard 1998 and Wierzbicka 1996) do not even offer arguments here (compare this to the extensive discussions elsewhere in the mentalist camp, e.g., in Jackendoff 2002 and Lakoff 1987). Durst (pp. 19-20), citing Wierzbicka (1985), suggests a single reason why Fregean senses (mentalist meanings) cannot be reduced to denotation …