Category-based Meaning

Three models for utterance understanding have been developed: code model, inferential model and ostensive-inferential model. They all have contributed a lot to the studies of human communication; Relevance Theory, in particular, has been a widely accepted paradigm for researches on communication. But they are all bound to be confronted with great trouble owing to their assumed theoretical basis: utterance understanding is a process of inferring.We hold that"inferring"in language use is not an end in itself but rather a means to understanding. When it cannot, practically, meet its starting point, it will remain helpless no matter how well we can revise it. On the other hand, the theory of meaning has been a central topic during the development of the philosophy of language or that of linguistics, and the theory of meaning has been an important element urging the development of modern philosophy of language, which, in turn, serves to guide the construction of the theory of meaning. This paper is right based on the 20th century's"cognitive turn"in philosophy, taking a cognitive perspective to discuss the meaning and the understanding of utterances.In this paper we propose that meaning is category-based. In other words, any language unit is per se a cognitive category, with all its potential meanings/senses as its category members. We first discuss briefly the difference between classic categories and cognitive categories, emphasizing the latter's great importance in semantic studies. In order to reanalyze the cognitive process of categorization, we put forward a new model for categorization understanding after a brief retrospection of Langacker's model. We also discuss the nature of category-based meaning, providing a new theoretical ground for utterance understanding. We hold that utterance understanding is not a process of meaning inferring, but an automatic cognitive activation of the meaning category's prototypical meaning member.After we have built a new model for utterance understanding, we take English ironies and Chinese ironies as a case and offer a detailed analysis for their understanding, which leads to a natural conclusion that utterance understanding relies much on cognitive activation rather than an inferring process. And this should be a cognitive law with universal...