Abstract
Cognitive semantics is part of a wider movement known as cognitive linguistics. In contrast to many other approaches, cognitive semantics is unashamedly ‘conceptualist’; that is, meanings are taken to be mental entities, which are grounded in general perceptual and cognitive capacities. Several important trends in cognitive semantics are discussed, including the embeddedness of linguistic meanings in encyclopedic knowledge, categorization, Figure-Ground organization, construal effects, embodiment, subjectification, and the semantic basis of syntactic categories. The issue of relativism vs. nativism is also addressed, since some strands in cognitive semantics research inevitably tend to underscore the language-specific nature of semantic structure, whereas other strands foreground what is universal in linguistic meaning.
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