Cognitive linguistics INTRODUCTION

Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last twenty-five years as a powerful approach to the study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition, and general meaning construction.

Cognitive Linguistics (CL) is not only a scientific approach to the study of language, but undoubtedly one of the most rapidly expanding schools in linguistics nowadays. As a dynamic and attractive framework within theoretical and descriptive linguistics, it proves to be one of the most exciting areas of research within the interdisciplinary project of cognitive science. Part of its seductiveness arises from the fact that CL aims at an integrated model of language and thought, at the building of a sharp theory of linguistic meaning that reflects the human construal of external reality, taking into account the way in which human beings experience reality, both culturally and psychologically (27). In its description of natural language, CL attempts to bridge "the distance between the social and the psychological, between the community and the individual, between the system and the application of the system, between the code and the actual use of the code" (26).

Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical " prototype " of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature

Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.

Functions of Language, 2009

2007

In D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 1266-1294., 2012

This article sheds light on the history of the sciences of mind within which the development of cognitive linguistics can be situated. It shows that it is the modern inheritor of an older tradition, antedating the behaviorist ascendancy in mid-twentieth century psychology which preceded classical cognitive science. This tradition, centered in psychology but drawing heavily on biology, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, was a kind of cognitive science avant la lettre. It is a measure of the poverty of behaviorism that psychology was compelled to concede disciplinary leadership in classical cognitive science to formalist linguistics and computer science. This article also considers conceptual foundations in psychology, including rule versus schema, the role of imagery in language comprehension and in cognition, consciousness and metacognition, self and autobiographic memory, meaning, embodiment, linguistic schemas and metaphor, and representation and symbolization.

It is proposed to examine, in brief, the relationship between linguistics and cognition. With Chomsky's mentalist approach linguistics became a study of cognition, and a member of the cognitive sciences. The field of cognitive linguistics has arisen in part to formalize this relationship between linguistics and cognition. It represents a revolt against some of the established norms of linguistics, as practiced around the last two or three decades of the twentieth century, and also a logical culmination represented as adoption and application of the thinking prevalent in the cognitive sciences to the study of language. Cognitive linguistics is a relatively new filed, but it has dedicated adherents and an expanding base. The concerns emergent of the association between linguistics and cognition are worthwhile of pursuit by a wide range of cognitive scientists. A review of the perspectives on linguistics and cognition is presented here.

2022

Cognitive Linguistics is the most swiftly growing school in modern linguistics. Theorists and practitioners in this discipline of linguistics work collaboratively to create a scientific, objectively verifiable approach to the study of language, integrating the theories and applications of general linguistics, philosophy, neurosciences and computer sciences. The cognitive approach to the study of language were originally grounded in philosophical thinking about how the brain functions vis-à-vis language processing and language learning, but more recent work highlights the significance of accumulating evidence from a wide-ranging empirical and methodological data base. The Cognitive Linguistics Reader encompasses significant writings by eminent scholars in the fields of cognitive linguistics accumulated over the last four decades, including both the classic seminal works and contemporary reflections and additions of cognitive linguistics to the different fields of linguistics. The essays and articles-selected to characterize a full-fledged range, scope and diversity of the Cognitive Linguistics sciences and applications-are clustered by theme into sections with each section discretely presented. The book opens with a comprehensive summary of Cognitive Linguistics intended for the beginner readership and closes with thorough additional readings to guide the reader through the thriving literature of this field. The Cognitive Linguistics Reader is both a perfect overview introducing the full gamut of Cognitive Linguistics and a complete, integrated reference book, bringing together the most significant work in the different fields of linguistics and other related sub-fields such as language acquisition and language pedagogy.

Cognitive linguistics today, 2002

Cognitive linguistics is on its way to becoming a cognitive science, but a number of problems remain. e relationship between cognitive linguistics and the core cognitive sciences (psychology and neurology) must be clarified: cognitive linguists can selectively import models and methods from these disciplines as a foundation for their linguistic theories, they can export their own models to these disciplines for empirical testing and integration, or they can transform linguistics into a core cognitive science in its own right. e latter requires a number of changes to the models and practices of cognitive linguistics: it must refocus on its linguistic heritage, adopt a more scientific outlook, gain a higher degree of methodological awareness and restrict its models to linguistic constructs and hypotheses that can be operationalized and falsified.