The module aims at introducing the key-terms of the paradigm of Cognitive Semantics, tracing back its origins in classical issues of the history of linguistic thought. In particular, it is addressed to a reconstruction of the 1970s and 1980s debates within Generative Linguistics, where the discard of the standard syntactic viewpoint reopened the question of the centrality of meaning both in cognitive processes and in current communicative activities. Outlining the notion of 'meaning' both from an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic perspective and presenting the so called «Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis», the main theories of cognitive semantics (Conceptual Theory of Metaphor, Frame Semantics, Prototype Theory and so forth) will be introduced and critically discussed. Particular attention will be devoted to the pre-conceptual embodied skeleton of conceptual structures (imaginative thought, mental simulation, basic concepts, image-schemata etc.). The module will also delineate the epistemological limits of cognitive semantics, and its becoming a theory of categorization more than a theory of language production and comprehension.

1) N. Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
2) M. Tomasello, Becoming Human. A theory of Ontogenesis, Harvard University Press, 2019.
3) Articles and other selected papers (available from the beginning of the lessons at Villa Mirafiori’s print-shop).