SEMANTILISED TASANDID JA SEMANTILISED PRIMITIIVID
Semantic Levels and Semantic Primitives

Summary/Abstract: From the synchronic aspect a linguistic meaning can be divided into seven levels. Beginning from the lowest, i.e. the most elementary, these are: 0. semantic primitive, 1. seme, 2. morpheme, 3. word, 4. phrase, 5. sentence, 6. discursive meaning. Upon defining the primary word as 'a minimal speech unit understandable (although not necessarily usable) outside context' the article focuses on semantic primitives. From the premises of conceptual and cognitive semantics (Peruzzi 2000; Jackendoff 2003; Gärdenfors 1999; Allwood 1999; Frawley 1992) semantic primitives can be defined as a subset of conceptual primitives. Perception and imaging differ by their input („extra-cerebral” and „intra-cerebral”, respectively, see Thomas 1999; Kosslyn, Behrmann & Jeannerod 1995), which causes a difference in output. But as the conceptual structure of the outputs of the two is either identical or very similar imaging is divided into different perceptual modalities such as visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory etc. There follows a description of certain semantic/conceptual primitives associated with visual, haptic, muscular and organic, temperature and auditory imaging, and their mutual relations. It is argued that the whole sphere of conceptualization can be represented as a graph with semantic/conceptual primitives at its nodes. Finally, the mutual relations of four modalities – imaginability, verbal expressibility, real possibility and artificial modellibility – are explicated.

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