ABSTRACT
During the past three decades, the development of a new branch ofscience, cognitive psychology, or more generally cognitive science, has given important fresh impetus to linguistics in general and semantics in particular. Cognitive science is concerned with how the human mind works, how it receives information from the environment via the senses and processes this information, recognizing what is perceived, comparing it to former data, classifying it and storing it in the memory. It tries to account for the complex ways in which the vast amount of information is structured in our minds, how we can operate with it when we think and reason. Language plays a central role in these theories. On the one hand, speech perception and production and the underlying mental structures are major objects of investigation. On the other hand, the way in which we use language to express what we ‘have in mind’ can tell much about how the human mind is organized.
