László Imre Komlósi: Cognitive and affective material in the Mental Lexicon Argumentum 9 (2013), 223-233 Debreceni Egyetemi Kiadó 223 László Imre Komlósi Cognitive and affective material in the Mental Lexicon The interface of form and meaning Abstract The paper is a quest for cognitive and affective material in conceptualization in order to elaborate on the coordinating mechanisms between form (linguistic structure) and meaning (conceptual structure and semantic structure) residing in the Mental Lexicon. The Mental Lexicon is seen as an active and dynamic, highly complex network of both neural and mental processes coordinated by conceptualization and manifested in language used in social verbal interaction. It is also taken to assume a central role in conceptualization which in turn is responsible for processing mental contents (mental representations, image schemas, mental models, memories, beliefs, intentions, plans, desires, mental projections, images, etc.), which have both cognitive and affective components. The analysis of linguistic examples shows that there is a wide range of parameters influencing the interpretation of linguistic structure and natural language use starting from formal semantics to inferential pragmatics, including quantification, modalities, intensional contexts, epistemic contexts, intentions, propositional attitudes, deictic relations, presuppositions and implicatures. Keywords: natural language processing, form and meaning, cognitive and affective mental contents, Mental Lexicon Once I thought I was wrong, but I was mistaken. (bumper sticker) “The nature of thought is a frustrating puzzle. Thoughts are where everything begins and ends.” Wallace Chafe (2005) 1 Semantic and conceptual interpretation in the mentalistic tradition With a steadily growing interest in cognitive approaches to linguistics, and an exponentially growing literature on cognitive linguistics, one finds it important to ask fundamental questions not only concerning the nature and methods of cognitive approaches, but also concerning the cognitive content to be identified in language and communication. It has been revolutionary to ascertain that general-purpose cognitive abilities facilitate and support mental processes that are responsible for language production and language processing beside special-purpose cognitive abilities. The original idea of a mental organ in identifying the Language Faculty is but one of the possible versions of the mentalist approaches, which happens to focus on the special status of syntax generating syntactic structure (cf. Chomsky 1965). On this view, autonomous syntax (as a core component of grammar) being responsible for computation, i.e. for symbol manipulation within a formal system of signs, is assumed to