Mental activities and linguistic structures

Abstract EN

Between the world - real or imaginary - and the linguistic domain, there is an area which is not directly observable; this is the area of conceptualization.

For many years linguists have been devoting their attention to this field of investigation.

Eighty years ago, Gustave Guillaume set about establishing schematic representation of mental trajectories (the radical binary tensor).

This line of research has been pursued, first by European semanticians, then by American cognitivists, oscillating between topo-synthetic graphic representation (the geometric approach) and logico-analytical formulation (the algebraic approach).

The hypothesis is that the speaker’s conceptualization of the universe is based on a reduced number of simple mental mechanisms and that these underlie all the more complex operations.