The Relation between Cognitive and Linguistic Structures

While there is large agreement that there must be a systematic relation between the cognition of single individuals and the public meaning of lingusitic expressions, there is no theory that could describe this relation systematically and formally. The aim of this paper is to describe a framework that is able to fill this gap. We will use frames as an adequate format to describe both mental representations and linguistic meaning. The central thesis is that the rich structures of individuals’ representations overlap in the sense that they share a common core. This core can be identified as the public meaning of the word associated with these mental representations (concepts). Both levels are systematically related by abstraction mechanisms (from cognition to language) and attunement mechanisms (from language to cognition).