Editing Conceptual semantics (section)

==Meaning and decomposition==

Jackendoff has claimed that the goal of conceptual semantics is to investigate:

{{Quote|text="...how linguistic utterances are related to human cognition, where cognition is a human capacity that is to a considerable degree independent of language, interacting with the perceptual and action systems as well as language."|sign=|source=(Jackendoff 2006:355)}}

Conceptual semantics distinguishes a single, universal meaning to a word. Instead of having a lexical semantic meaning in addition to the conceptual representation of the actual referent, here the two are combined into what Jackendoff calls "lexical concepts" (Murphy 2010:59). Conceptual semantics is considered to be not just a linguistic theory, but a theory on human cognition. As do many semantic theories, Jackendoff claims that a decompositional method is necessary to explore conceptualization. Just as one of the ways a physical scientist tries to understand matter is by breaking it down into progressively smaller parts, so a scientific study of conceptualization proceeds by breaking down, or decomposing, meanings into smaller parts. However, this decomposition cannot go on forever, for at some point, meanings can no longer be broken down.

This is the level of conceptual structure, the level of mental representations which encode the human understanding of the world, containing the primitive conceptual elements out of which meanings are built, plus their rules of combination. Conceptual semantics does not work with a mental dictionary, in the classical sense. There are no definitions attached to concepts and reference, only the idea of the concept or reference itself. Just as generative syntax posits a finite set of syntactic categories and rules for combining them, so, too, does Conceptual Semantics posit 'a finite set of mental primitives and a finite set of principles of mental combination' governing their interaction (Jackendoff 1990: 9). Jackendoff refers to this set of primitives and the rules governing them as the 'grammar of sentential concepts' (Jackendoff 1990: 9).

His starting point is a close analysis of the meanings of lexemes dedicated to bringing out parallelisms and contrasts which reveal the nature of the conceptual structures underlying them. Jackendoff considers the lexicon to be made of three parts: phonological, syntactic, and conceptual. These three aspects of a concept give a "full picture of a word" (Murphy 2010:60). What his method shows, he says, is that the psychological organization on which meaning rests 'lies a very short distance below the surface of everyday lexical items –
and that progress can be made in exploring it' (1991: 44).
Jackendoff claims that a decompositional method is necessary to explore conceptual structure, in which the concepts underlying word
meaning are broken down into their smallest elements: conceptual primitives envisaged as the semantic equivalents of phonological features. Conceptual Semantics posits 'a finite set of mental primitives and a finite set of principles of mental combination' governing their interaction. The conceptual structure of a lexical item is an element with zero or more open argument slots, which are filled by the syntactic complements of the lexical item.