ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that traditional ideas of language meaning and text comprehension are no longer warranted in today's scientific and philosophical context. Embodied cognitive science suggests that during text comprehension, the very experience of hearing or reading words automatically activates preassociated sensorimotor representations of their referents in the brain. Text meaning – seen as the product of a language comprehension process – is purely an objective representation of meaning existing prior to and independently of the individual comprehender. A concept of meaning as a relative interaction potential allows us to explain text comprehension as a result of ordinary perceptual activity and corresponding action. Many of the signs created during comprehension will reflect typical sign constructions in accordance with existing lexica but yet the signs are not predetermined. Cognitivist psychological explanations of text comprehension currently portray the end result of comprehension as an impersonal objective representation of a narrated world.