The role of the cognitive model profile in knowledge representation and meaning construction: the case of the lexical item Europe

Abstract

The paper addresses the role of the cognitive model profile, one of the fundamental constructs in LCCM Theory (a.k.a. access semantics), in meaning construction and knowledge representation with respect to the concept of Europe. The study is based on a corpus of news articles retrieved from the Guardian from May 2004 through December 2009 (approximately 930,000 words) and focuses on the lexical item Europe (over 4000 corpus occurrences). The study takes its theoretical underpinnings from LCCM Theory, a theory of lexical representation and semantic composition, which delineates the roles the linguistic and the conceptual systems play in meaning construction (e.g., Evans 2009, 2013).The paper documents the immense semantic potential of the lexical item Europe as manifest in the Guardian’s discourse under analysis. In terms of knowledge representation, to account for the coherent body of multimodal knowledge which the lexical item Europe affords access to, its cognitive model profiles relevant to its two lexical concepts are constructed. As far as the role of the cognitive model profile in meaning construction is concerned, the study demonstrates how the context, specifically the co-text, determines the activation of a respective portion of the cognitive model profile of the lexical item Europe.