What is a "concept" in modern linguistics?
Abstract
In the article the Author poses a question concerning the understanding of the term "concept" (syn. "notion") in linguistics - its status as a subject of a semantic description ("concept" in relation to "meaning") and as an element of metalanguage. She confronts the earlier structuralist perspective originating from logic with more recent ones used in psychology and cognitive linguistics, in which the meaning of linguistic units is equated directly with a notion as a mental conceptualisation and in fact as a conceptualisation process.
The most important novum in the cognitive understanding of a "concept" as a subject of linguistic description is, according to the Author, the renunciation of the classical perspective (a conceptual category as "a set of features reserved for a class of items") and demystification - especially with reference to popular categories - its ostensibly objective static nature. A notion is treated as an area of knowledge organised (profiled) in a special manner at the background of the whole network of cognitive relations, that is embracing also elements of emotions, valuation, perspective and interaction of conceptualisers. Creating notions and encoding them in language thus requires other methods of representing the meaning of linguistic units than those well-grounded in linguistics under the influence of logical semantics - so that the descriptions refer not only to the designatum but also to the cognising entity.
