A Cognitive Study on the Interactive Relation Between Structure and Meaning

Structure and meaning are two inseparable parts of language and respective study of them is for better catching subtle meaning. The paper analyzes the interaction law between structure and meaning through examples of complicated sentences from cognitive perspective. In the interaction, meaning plays dominant role. There exist hierarchical layers in the structure and uneven position between the central and marginal elements, and so does the meaning. Central structure corresponds to central meaning and marginal structure corresponds to minor meaning. The study provides empirical and theoretical rationale for the relation law. The concept of centrality and marginality originates in human's embodied experience and embeds in language.