Conventionalized cognition conventionalizes cognition

Abstract

Language may be viewed as a system of conventionalized cognition in the sense that it conventionally conceptualizes a range of perceived realities shared by a community of speakers. In this talk, I focus on how language, and Chinese in particular, conventionalizes cognition in order to contribute to a macro-theory of cognitive informatics. Based on distributional data from a large-scale corpus, I will show that Chinese conventionally and selectively represents important aspects of cognition, such as transition vs. state, and production vs. perception. I will also draw attention to the fact that these conventions lead to the packaging of cognitive events, i.e., following Pustejovsky's event coercion, which can be seen as an extension of Aristotle's four causes of knowledge. Lastly, relying on this intuition that language conventionalizes cognition, I will propose a simple yet robust approach to text-based emotion detection and classification.