Abstract Carrion

Mental Perception and Cognition: A Frame-Semantics Perspective

Most studies on cognition reveal its connection to human cognitive capabilities such as perception, emotion, and movement. In this talk, however, the term cognition refers to a conceptual domain that denotes any type of state, activity or process of the human mind of a purely conceptual character.

Based on the theory of Frame Semantics, I propose an outline of the cognition domain, which takes the project FrameNet as point of departure, but entrenches with cognitive science claims on their understanding of cognition. That is, I propose a re-structuring of the domain using not only the information provided by dictionaries, and corpora, which reflect how language users think cognition works, but taking into account cognitive scientists’ perspective of cognition. These non-exclusive perspectives (e.g. folk model vs. expert model) can only enrich the layout of the domain. Subsequently, the final layout of the domain shows the creation of new frames, inclusion of new frame elements as well as the modification of some frame definitions according to cognitive science references. In addition to this, the domain is characterised by what I have called ‘cognitive-semantic attributes’, which run parallel to the most basic ‘semantic types’ described in the FrameNet project.

Finally, there is a proposal of the frame to frame relations within this domain. An illustration of these relations will be presented for the frames: Mental_perception (perceptual act), Coming_to_Believe (change of state of knowledge) and Awareness (state of knowledge).

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