engleski

Emergence of Social Reality in the Ontological model of the Lexical Concepts and Constructions

As argued by the cognitive linguistic theories (Langacker 2008), language is a symbolic tool that enables human representation and the categorization of the world. This implies that language(s) conveys the knowledge about the world, but also models our representation of the world (Searle 2010:61, Casasanto 2016). This paper addresses the possibility to map out: a) the ontological hierarchy of categories within specific knowledge domain(s), and b) the ontological relations of lexical concepts and linguistic constructions used to construe the meanings of specific domain(s) within some corpora. In the ontological description of the lexical referential meaning we are guided by the hierarchical approach that combines the framework of embodied epistemology and ontological description of lexical concepts theoretically founded on the emergence principles, particularly John Searle’s distinct epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective domains (Searle 1995 ; 2008 ; 2010). This approach leads to the distinction of three emergent superdomains named “Matter”, “Psychological” and “Sociological”. The concepts within these superdomains are hierarchically sub-organized in 16 classes on the principles of prototypical categorization, emergent properties, in class and mereological relations that are formalized and visualised in a graph property database Neo4j with 1 400 000 categories. The semantic properties of linguistic constructions are formalized from the qualitative and quantitative description of the grammatical relations: for instance, N+V, V+N, Adj+N, etc., extracted from the queries performed on the large corpuses, such as of Croatian (hrWac) and English (enTenTen). This layer mapps semantic relations that can be seen as a distinctively linguistic construal of the knowledge. Formalizing semantic interconnectivity (Indurkhya 1992) of these conceptualizations is necessary for the understanding of figurative language and creation of (cross)cultural metaphor repositories (ihjj.hr/metafore/metanet-hr, https://metanet.icsi.berkeley.edu/metanet). The main aim of this multidimensional mapping is to articulate the standard procedures for differentiating the semantic properties established by linguistic constructions from the ontological referential meanings established by patterns of contingent mereological relations of the things in the world. In other words, we want to formalize the distinctive properties of creative processes that language as an instrument of interaction, identification and cognizing adds to the representation of the knowledge, and especially the construal of social concepts, and implicitly social reality. Keywords: linguistic construal of social reality, emergence, construction grammar, graph property database References: Casasanto, D. (2016) Linguistic relativity. In Riemer, N. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Semantics. Routledge. Indurkhya, B (1992) Metaphor and Cognition: An Interactionist Approach. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Langacker, R. (2008) Cognitive Grammar : An Introduction. Oxford University Press Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. Simon and Schuster. Searle, J. (2008) Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays. Cambridge University Press Searle, J. (2010). Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. Oxford University Press. Resources: http://sketchengine.co.uk/

social ontology, lexicalization, conceptualization, system theory

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