Conventionalized cognition conventionalizes cognition

Language may be viewed as a system of conventionalized cognition in the sense that it conventionally conceptualizes a range of perceived realities shared by a community of speakers. In this talk, I focus on how language, and Chinese in particular, conventionalizes cognition in order to contribute to a macro-theory of cognitive informatics. Based on distributional data from a large-scale corpus, I will show that Chinese conventionally and selectively represents important aspects of cognition, such as transition vs. state, and production vs. perception. I will also draw attention to the fact that these conventions lead to the packaging of cognitive events, i.e., following Pustejovsky´s event coercion, which can be seen as an extension of Aristotle´s four causes of knowledge. Lastly, relying on this intuition that language conventionalizes cognition, I will propose a simple yet robust approach to text-based emotion detection and classification.