Kognitívum

Kognitívum is a Hungarian linguistic term used to designate a category of lexical items that encode cognitive content—mental processes, states, and related phenomena. The word is formed by adding the suffix -um to kognitív, following Hungarian patterns of nominalization.

In scholarly usage, kognitívum covers words and constructions that express thinking, knowing, perceiving, remembering, and other mental phenomena. Depending on the author, the category may include cognitive verbs such as tudni (to know) or gondolkodni (to think), as well as epistemic or perceptual predicates, and corresponding nouns or nominalizations like tudás (knowledge) or emlékezet (memory). The term is mainly employed in Hungarian cognitive linguistics and philosophy of language to distinguish mental-content expressions from affective or action-oriented terms. Because the boundaries of the category differ among researchers, the exact scope of kognitívum is not universally agreed.

The notion aligns with broader theories in cognitive semantics and mental representation, though kognitívum remains a language-specific labeling rather than a universal syntactic class. It is primarily of interest to scholars working with Hungarian data, and its equivalents in other languages are described with more specific terms such as cognitive verbs, mental-state predicates, or epistemic nouns. See also cognitive linguistics, mental state language, and epistemic modality.