Psychology 2134A/B Lecture : The Meaning of Meaning
16 Jan 2012
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Document Summary
mechanisms of semantic memory and how they are related to our understanding of meaning controversies about whether figurative language is "special" or distinct from semantic meaning. proposed mechanisms for uncovering figurative meaning in an utterance. Part of our long-term memory system, it encompasses our knowledge of concepts. This is a type of explicit or declarative knowledge, such that it is sometimes called our encyclopedic knowledge. Semantic knowledge is knowledge of discrete concepts, which includes objects, ideas, actions, properties, really anything you can think of can be a concept. We don"t think of concepts and words as the same thing because to do so assumes that every language has a word for every concept we know this is not true. For instance not every language has separate color name for green vs. blue. In 1969 collins & quillian published an influential theory of semantic memory, that we encode the meanings of concepts within a linked network.
