Grammatical morphemes, conceptual structures and semantic representation

Abstract

Abstract: This paper takes issue with the view of conceptual structures as autonomous syntactic structures generated by syntactic formation rules. Instead, it adopts the position developed by Croft and Cruse (2004), in showing that linguistic knowledge – knowledge of meaning and form – is basically conceptual structure. It also provides an explanation, through the analysis of the uses of the -s morpheme and the - ø morpheme in English as well as the noun-class morpheme -m in Tagbana, about the fact that grammatical morphemes cannot be treated as abstract symbols devoid of intrinsic meaning. In fact the syntactic configurations which characterize the notions of plurality expressed by these morphemes evidence the types of conceptualization attached to them. The semantic representations denoted by these morphemes are, then, proven to be basically conceptual.