cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics is one of the fastest growing and influential perspectives on the nature of language, the mind, and their relationship with sociophysical (embodied) experience. It is a broad theoretical and methodological enterprise, rather than a single, closely articulated theory. Its primary commitments are outlined. These are the Cognitive Commitment-a commitment to providing a characterization of language that accords with what is known about the mind and brain from other disciplines-and the Generalization Commitment-which represents a dedication to characterizing general principles that apply to all aspects of human language. The article also outlines the assumptions and worldview which arises from these commitments, as represented in the work of leading cognitive linguists.

Cognitive linguistics is the joint product of largely independent research programs begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s by scholars who shared the general goal of making grammatical and semantic theory responsible to the facts of usage and the flexibility of the human conceptual capacity. But what kind of product is it? To those outside the immediate spheres of influence of its major proponents (George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier, Leonard Talmy, among others), it might appear to be nothing more than an inventory of disparate constructs (prototype-based categories, semantic frames, mental spaces, metaphorical mappings) or even a set of case studies of linguistic idiosyncrasies. It doesn’t seem to DO anything, or at least it does not provide a uniform grammatical or semantic formalism. Instead, cognitive linguistics is a worldview, in which words, rather than denoting things in the world, are points of entry into conceptual networks (Langacker 1987, 1991), and syntactic patterns, rather than merely grouping symbols together, are cognitive and even motor routines of varying degrees of entrenchment and internal complexity (Bybee 2001).

Cognitive linguistics is one of the fastest growing and influential perspectives on the nature of language, the mind, and their relationship with sociophysical (embodied) experience. It is a broad theoretical and methodological enterprise, rather than a single, closely articulated theory. Its primary commitments are outlined. These are the Cognitive Commitment-a commitment to providing a characterization of language that accords with what is known about the mind and brain from other disciplines-and the Generalization Commitment-which represents a dedication to characterizing general principles that apply to all aspects of human language. The article also outlines the assumptions and worldview which arises from these commitments, as represented in the work of leading cognitive linguists.

Journal for Research Scholars and Professionals of English Language Teaching, 2021

The present paper is an attempt to simplify and comprehend what Cognitive Linguistics deals. It helps the learners, students of linguistics and teachers of ELT understand the characteristics and phenomena of Cognitive Linguistics, providing a succinct overview of Cognitive Linguistics. It is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics and a cluster of overlapping approaches to the study of language as a mental phenomenon. Linguistics basically focuses on the sounds, words, grammar rules and rules of a language consisting of phonology (the sound system), morphology (the structure of words), syntax (the arrangement of words into sentences) and semantics (meanings). Cognitive linguistics is an integrated model-a collection of comprehensive investigations of a wide range of cognitive and linguistic phenomena.

For the purpose of this chapter, 'cognitive linguistics' refers to the movement initiated in the 1980s by, amongst others, Lakoff and Langacker. The chapter surveys the implications for the study of language of the predominately empiricist stance adopted by cognitive linguists in contrast to the rationalism of the Chomskyan approach. After a summary of the contributions of Lakoff and Langacker, the chapter addresses two recent trends in cognitive linguistic researchthe focus on constructions and the role of corpus-based data in assessing the usage-basis of linguistic knowledge.

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.

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).

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.

Functions of Language, 2009