Ke vztahu kognitivního obsahu a jazykového významu
On the relation between cognitive content and linguistic meaning

Summary/Abstract: The necessity to distinguish between ontological (cognitive, extralinguistic) content and linguistic (‚literal’) meaning has its sources in European structural linguistics. The idea that the task of linguistics itself is to study language in its „form“ rather than in its „sub-stance“ is further elaborated in the Prague Linguistic Circle. However, analyzing concre-te language data we often face many open questions: It is not always clear how to divide the knowledge of language from the knowledge of the world, which general criteria could be used for the separation of (language) ambiguity and vagueness etc. The present contribution cannot be aimed at the solution of these non-trivial distinctions; we only present some Czech examples as a challenge for consideration, which we believe to be useful for the determination of this boundary. The examples belonging to the different phenomena of language structure are analyzed from the point of view of the asymmetry between the layer of content and the layer of meaning. The examples with different aspectual and tense forms are used as an exemplification of the asymmetry „same con-tent – different meanings“. The reflexive forms, dative case dependent on the verb, core-ference with infinitival and other constructions serve as examples of the situation whe-re instances of different content are not articulated as oppositions in linguistic meaning but rather display structural ambiguity. Despite of these problems, we are convinced that without keeping the distinction between linguistic meaning and cognitive content during the analysis of language data the description of the language system is impossible.

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