Mental Spaces Theory

This presentation explores a view of meaning construction developed in cognitive semantics. Here, we consider how larger units of language like sentences and texts (units of discourse larger than the sentence) are meaningful. It is to this level of linguistic organisation that the term ‘meaning construction’ applies.
In speaking about things in the world we constantly evoke all kinds of knowledge associated with these conceptual units. Radden and Dirven (2007, p. 31) state that these short-lived packages of knowledge evoked in communication are known as mental spaces.