A REVIEW ON MEANINGS OF EMOTIONS: STEPS TO A NEURAL-INFORMATIONAL NOTION OF SEMANTICS

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ABSTRACT

The current analytical review begins with a procedural discussion of semantics over antecedent philosophical perspectives such as platonic approach, semantic realism, and Fregeanism, showing that such frameworks are not capable in explaining the semantics of emotions. The review then introduces an alternative view to emotional semantics. The notion of Neuro-Informational Semantics refers to a cognitive-neural approach in considering affective meanings. This approach suggests that the emotional lexicon is conceptualized by individuals only if objectified correlates of emotional terms are fabricated through a sign, or piece of information, within the brain system or the brain-like organism. This alternative approach describes the neural-informational coding of semantics, and it proposes that behavioral attributes, cognitive values, and informational structure of emotional states should be employed to follow the idea that emotional words are labeled for meanings due to their correlated neuron-like bodies as their referents. Available evidence achieved from neuro-scientific experiments augment this particular idea. The review concludes that meanings of emotions are generated when there is a perceptual process including informational interaction of agents with the environment.

KEYWORDS: semantics, psycho-semantics, cognitive, neural-information, agents

The story of studying meaning goes back to the time of Socrates and Plato and has continued so far to be debated with much deliberation and, naturally, with different perspectives (Gasparri & Marconi, 2015; Cruse, 1986). Geeraerts (2010) has, for example, categorized the studies on sèmantics into two major perspectives. Lexical semantics is the first linguistic perspective discussing the meaning-word relationship. This perspective explores meaning via pre-structuralist, structuralist and neostructuralist, generativist, neogenerativist, and cognitive approaches to semantics. Following these approaches, many existing studies have looked at how emotional words are constructed and perceived in the linguistic and cultural context (Wierzbicka, 1992, 1999; Kleinginna, 1981; Lindquist, 2006). Psycholinguistic approaches encompass the second perspective on semantic research. These approaches investigate how the human mind comprehends, produces, and acquires word meanings. There are also studies following this perspective that search how emotional objects, events and concepts are represented and processed in the human brain (Warglien, 2013).

The differentiation or commonality of interest between lexical semantics and psychology of language is probably controversial. The current analytical review, however, does not seek to argue which of the mentioned approaches, or combinations between them, is most appropriate to adopt...