Cognitive Linguistics; Cognitive Grammar 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.1.

History Though Noam Chomsky is often quoted as one whose work contributed to the foundat ion of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics as such grew out of ideas that w ere in direct opposition to Chomskyan linguistics in the 1970s. Thus, one branch of cognitive linguistics, construction grammar (William Croft, Michael Tomasell o, Laura Jaunda) is developed upon a conceptual framework that, (1) exposes the f laws of linguistic nativism, (2) shows experiential learning to be at the center of the process by which one individual acquires a certain language, and (3) alm ost denies the existence of syntax (and, thus, of Syntactic Structures. Accordi ng to these new positions, children do not first acquire syntactic structures wh ich they then furnish with various sets of verbs, but rather they acquire the in dividual verbs first and then associate them with some constructions, and the co nstructions for one verb are not transferable to other verbs. Such scholars as C harles Filmore, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy were among the first to prop ose and agree that Chomsky was wrong in assuming that meaningthe result of interp retationis peripheral to the study of language, and that syntax functions accordi ng to principles independent of meaning: on the contrary, meaning is central to the study of language and the study of meaning is central to cognitive linguisti cs; all linguistic units are meaningful and the complex relationships (in the hu man mind) between meaning and form should form the basis of linguistic analysis. Other branches of the new investigation field developed in the 1970s, such as functional linguisticsdiscourse functional linguistics and functional-topologi cal linguistics--, all of them also defending the position that language should be studied with reference to its cognitive, experiential, and social contexts, a ll of which go beyond the linguistic system as such. As already suggested, much work was being done (Piagets influence) in child language acquisition; quite a nu mber of cognitively oriented researchers (Elizabeth Bates, Eve Clark, Dan Sobin) studied acquisition empirically and saw the problem as one of learning, once aga in rejecting Chomskys claim of the innateness of the linguistic capacity. In the 1980s, frame semantics and construction grammar (Talmy, Langacker, L akoff) develop Oscar Ducrots and Gilles Fauconniers theory of mental spaces and th en that of conceptual blending (with Mark Turner as an important exponent); ther e are more and more adherents in America and around the world, the first confere nce of Cognitive Linguistics is organized in 1989, and the first issue of the jo urnal Cognitive Linguistics is published in 1990; in the 2000s the number of cog nitive linguists can be counted by the hundreds, and bibliographical lists are a lready overwhelming. 3.2. Definitions; Characterizations As a central part of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics expanded to cover such various areas as semantics, syntax, less of morphology and phonology, some of historical linguistics and, obviously, much pragmatics, with stylistics as an emerging opening. A good summary of the intellectual pursuits practiced by cognitive linguist s is given by Dirk Geeraerts in J. Verschueren et als, eds. (1995) Handbook of P ragmatics, p.112: Because cognitive linguistics sees language as embedded in the overall cogni tive capacities of man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics inc lude: the structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as History Definitions; Characterizations Cognitive Linguistics Cognitive Grammar Overview

prototypicality, systematic polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery and meta phor); the functional principles of linguistic organization (such as iconicity a nd naturalness); the conceptual interface between syntax and semantics ( as expl ored by cognitive grammar and construction grammar); the experiential and pragma tic background of language-in-use; and the relationship between language and tho ught, including questions about relativism and conceptual universals. Once again, the theoretical assumptions of generative linguistics are regarded a s insufficiently grounded: all linguistic units have meaningful semantic structu res and linguistic forms are designed to express these semantic structures; thus cognitive linguistics takes language creation and development, language learnin g and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general, which implies that there is no autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind, and that kno wledge of language, in children or adults, arises out of language use; linguisti c cognition occupies no special place among other forms of cognition and the phe nomenon of linguistic cognition is a unified one within consciousness, so that b orders between traditional linguistic processes (phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics) can and should be crossed. An important premise of cognitive linguistics is that meaning is embodied: the experiential basis for our understanding is provided by our bodies through o ur organs of perception and senses: up/down, near/far, over/under, hard/soft; whi ch is why metaphor is regarded by many (not just Lakoff, Johnson, and Turner) as the main expressive form for the texture of meaning. 3.3. Cognitive Linguistics Related as it is to philosophy (where, as a matter of fact it has found its sour ces and inspiration), psychology and neuro-psychology as well as artificial inte lligence studies, cognitive linguistics can as yet be best described as a trend or movement, assumptions and methods resulting in quite a number of different bu t convergent theories. As already suggested, one premise is based upon the accep tance of some general principles that apply to all aspects of the language; prev ious formal linguistics (including Chomsky), as is too well known, dedicated spe cial chapters and specific types of effort to the study of sound, words and sent ences, sentence structure and organization, morphology, or discourse study; huma n mind appears here as modular and the components of language are distinct and s hould be studied distinctly; for cognitive linguists there is a common set of hu man cognitive abilities that gives birth to linguistic knowledge as a whole. And thus the cognitive linguistic approach may be regarded as vertical (across laye rs of linguistic organization, from top to bottom, through sound structure, lexi con, syntactic organizations)rather than horizontal (each layer individually and on its own terms). Another premise is that the general principles of language should be studie d interdisciplinarily, on the basis of whatever information can be found in othe r researches about the brain and the mind; the human cognitive system is, in thi s view, a unified one and linguistic theories have got to observe these processe s and structures like any other theories in philosophy, brain sciences, cognitiv e neuroscience and so on; components of any model of investigation should come f rom convergent evidence for the reality being studied; so generalizations are us ed to transcend specific cognitive domains; conceptual blending, for instance, i mplies that the same principles apply to grammatical constructions, to metaphor, and framing; such generalizations are important in understanding how language r elates to general cognition. And the reality above is made up of language and the mind, which we can sub stitute for their near synonyms knowledge and consciousness; then knowledge and any or all sets of mental structures, and, finally, the relationship between kno wledge and sign (language is a sign system designed or developed for categorizin g, storing, retrieving, and processing information, which is, of course, the com putational metaphor of mind, a metaphor on which most modern theories of cogniti

on are built). In their turn signs are taken to be binary structures, analyzable in terms of form and content, which are used by senders to process certain enco ded meanings, and by the receivers to decode them; and meaning or signification is the result of a cognitive contact between an organism (with a body and a mind ) and the environment. However, this traditional model for the exchange of information via encodin g senderencoded messagedecoding receiver has come to be challenged by the new assu mption that language is connotational rather than denotational, and so the conce pt of a consensual domain between speaker and listener became necessary; the spe akers and listeners background knowledge affects coategorical decisions and the ac quisition o f new concepts during this transfer of information/knowledge; the ex perience of our environment, moreover, affects the on-going process of object reco gnition and categorization; so what is necessaryand cognitive scientists have agr eed on this to be sois to take into account the experientially shared evidence as a consesually accepted cognitive domain of human interactions. In this view, th e computational metaphor of the mind will define language as a specific consensu al environmental domain serving as a cognitive interface with the world; thus, a n interface that is consensual, environmental, highly specific, interactive, and cognitive; consensual in that you are not a Japanese physicist who accepts to g o and address , in Japanese, a French audience of old ladies interested in femin ism, nor that you are a listener who makes a similarly unusual; choice; the envi ronment would include the communication medium, the domain expertise, the type o f communicative code, etc.; specificity is a term we generally use to point to p articulars we cannot always define; interactivein the sense that much of the mean ing may be provided by the coder; and cognitive covering knowledge and consciou sness. It may be simply noticed now that, in fact, cognitive linguistics takes us back to an old tradition, in which language is seen as an instrument in the serv ice of constructing and communicating meaning, being, at the same time, a possib ility of looking at how the mind functions; so it is not only the cognition in t he language, but the cognition that lies behind the language that matters, becau se it supports the dynamics of language use, language acquisition and change. As Gilles Fauconnier puts it (in T. Janssen and G. Redeker, eds, Scope and Foundat ion of Cognitive Linguistics), language is only the tip of a spectacular iceberg , and as we use language in any form or context, we unconsciously draw on vast c ognitive resources: this backstage cognition includes view points and reference p oints, figure-ground/profile-base/landmark-trajector organization, metaphorical, analogical, and other mappings, idealized models, framing, construal, mental sp aces, counterpart connections, roles, prototypes, metonymy, polysemy, conceptual blending, fictive motion, force dynamics.(p.1) That is why the methods of cognitive linguistics would have to be applied t o non-linguistic cognition as well as to the contextual aspects of language use: thus, language in context, discourse, inferences drawn by the participants in t he exchange, assumptions, frames, etc.; in other words, descriptions and analyse s of full and complex contexts in which the energy of meaning construction can b e observed and evaluated; and this can be primarily done by noticing the complex ity of this process of meaning construction in contrast with the simplicity or b revity of the linguistic expression; the consensual mentioned above points to a re lative uniformity of the cognitive substrate, which allows for a high degree of consistency in communication; language use activates networks in the brain that are there not by birth, but are there as organized by cognition and culture, plu s the physical and mental context; the fact that meaning is in the language form s alone is an illusion relegated to the past and to folk theories. Meaning is mostly in this backstage cognition, whichagaindoes not follow differ ent operations that apply to various levels of linguistic analysis (semantics, s yntax, etc.); rather, it operates uniformly at all levels; as an example, metaph or does not only function at the rhetorical, stylistic, or figurative level, but it cuts across (see the various layers above) almost all possible levels, from the simplest to the most sophisticated; and the same goes for viewpoint organiza tion, mental space connections, prototypes, schemas and frames, conceptual blend

ing and analogy, force dynamics, (Leonard Talmy) and fictive motion; ;hence the remarkable generalizations uncovered by cognitive linguists across linguistic le vels, from morphemes and words to sentence, its context, and whole discourse; li nguistics is no longer a number of various accounts about the different properti es of one or several languages, but a meansprobably the most powerful oneof openin g a window into general cognition. 3.4. Cognitive Grammar We have already noted that in cognitive linguistics the boundary between cogniti ve approaches to semantics on one hand and to grammar on the other is not clearl y defined, meaning and grammar being seen as complementary and interdependent; a cognitive approach to semantics means understanding how the linguistic systemstu dies by cognitive grammarrelates to our conceptual system; in its turn, this conc eptual system relates to embodied experience. So cognitive grammar consists in t he study of the full range of units that make up a language, from the lexical to the grammatical, on the basis of the assumption that the basic grammatical unit is a symbolic unit, and thus form cannot be studied independently of meaning, a s in many traditional formal grammars; one central idea is that of a lexicon-gra mmar continuum, in which both a content word and a grammatical construction coun t as symbolic units. It seems obvious that this symbolic principle of (Langackers ) cognitive grammar has its roots in the Saussurean symbol made up of a signifie r (the phonological/graphic pole) and a signified (the semantic pole), both of w hich are psychological entities, in that they belong within the mental system of linguistic knowledge. A second principle of cognitive grammar holds that a speakers knowledge of t he language is formed by abstracting the above symbolic units from instances of language use; thus, there seems to be no distinction between competence (knowled ge of language) and performance (use of language), knowledge of language being k nowledge of how language is used. In The Cognitive Linguistic Reader (Equinox, 2006), Vyvyan Evans, Benjamin K. Bergen, and Jorg Zinken (The Cognitive Linguistic Enterprise: An Overview) offe r a classification of the major theories and approaches to types of cognitive gr ammars, i.e. those that concentrate on language as a system of knowledge. First in their list is Leonard Talmys model (Toward a cognitive Semantics, 2000) which, as his title shows, proposes a distinction between the lexical subsystem of lan guage and its grammatical subsystem: the lexical subsystem is made up of open-cl ass elements, which are highly rich in terms of content, and closed-class elemen ts (grammatical), which encode schematic or structural meaning. His relevant exa mple of closed-class elements is that while most languages have nominal inflecti ons (dual or plural) to indicate number, no nominal inflections exist in any lan guage for color, i.e. there are no grammatical affixes to indicate blueness (the intricate problem of qualia). In Talmys views, the grammatical closed-class syst em provides the basis above which are laid the elements of the open-class system ; Talmy argues that, since there is no limit to human experience, knowledge and understanding, there is no inventory of concepts expressible by grammatical form s, while there is a restricted inventory of concepts expressible by lexical form s (a dictionary). The grammatical, closed-class elements appear to cluster in a schematic system, which includes a configurational system, an attentional system , a perspectival system, and a force-dynamics system. Cogniive grammar proper is represented by Ronald Langacker and his two volu mes (published in 1987 and 1991) of Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Langacker follows Talmy in arguing that grammatical, closed-class units are inherently mea ningful, i.e. grammatical categories, for instance, are expressed by meaningful morphemes or constructions; knowledge of language is represented in the speakers mind as an inventory of such symbolic units, i.e. symbolic entities that are sto red (cognitive routine) and accessed as a whole, rather than being built composi tionally by the language system; these units are conventional and are shared amo ng the members of a speech community (some of them, like dog, are more conventio nal, i.e. share by the quasi-totality of the members, while others are less conv

entional, i.e. restricted to groups, categories or classes of members). Further on, symbolic units, like the morpheme for instance, can be simplex in terms of t heir symbolic structures, while others, like words, phrases or whole sentences, are complex constructions. Finally, the symbolic units are not stored in the min d in a random way, but ones whole inventory is structured according to relationsh ips established between and among units; some units may be subparts of other uni ts (morphemes make up words, words make up phrases, phrases and words make up se ntences), so that there is a set of interlinking and overlapping relationships c onceived as networks; and there are schemas in terms of which knowledge of lingu istic patterns is conceived. A thir category is that of constructional approaches to grammar, represente d, first, by Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, Mary Katherine OConnor, and Beryl T. Atk ins (1975-1992, see the edition of Frames, Fields and Contrasts, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992). Their position is, obviously, that grammar can be modeled in ter ms of constructions rather than words and rules; a grammatical construction, lik e kick the bucket, has a meaning or meanings that cannot be understood or expla ined on the basis of their components, so it has to be stored whole, rather than b uilt step by step. Another model of construction grammar is that proposed by the same group of linguists, with the similar principle that syntactic, semantic, p honological and pragmatic knowledge is represented in constructions (like let a lone), where all the information is contained in a simple unified representation . Another development is proposed by Adele Goldberg (Constructions: A Constru ction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure, Chicago: Chicago U.P., 1995), who, by obviously focusing on verb argument constructions, manages to prove that sen tence-level constructions exhibit the same sort of phenomena as other linguistic units, including polysemy relations and metaphor extensions. William Croft (Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typologica l Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2002) and D. Allan Cruse explore linguis tic typology in terms of similarity and diversity; their aim is to develop a mod el of language that combines typological insights with a meaning-based model of language structure (see supra); instead of grammatical universals in all the wor lds languages, which assumes a formal universal grammar, it is grammatical divers ity that should be taken as a starting point in building a model that accounts f or typological variation; rather than place the emphasis on generalization, Crof t sees a constructional approach that articulates the arbitrary and the unique; for the radical investigator, the only theoretical element is the construction, while word classes, word patterns, and grammatical relations are epiphenomenal, and thus syntax does not exist. A fourth, even more recent model of construction grammar comes form Benjami n Bergen, Nancy Chang and others (see Construction Grammars: Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005), with an emphasis on language processing and described as embodied construction grammar, i.e. deve loping a formal language to describe, first, the constructions in a certain lang uage and, secondly, how these constructions give rise to embodied concepts in dy namic language comprehension. Finally, Evans, Bergen and Zinken mention cognitive approaches to grammatic alization, i.e. the process of language change by which closed-class, grammatica l elements (see above) evolve from the open-class system; grammaticalization is seen as a process that falls in the field of historical linguistics. 3.5. Overview As a central part of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics offers both an und erstanding of other types of investigations into the acquiring and transmission of human language and a new understanding of how language works. By investigatin g the relationships between language, mind, and socio=physical experience, cogni tive linguistics rejects former dominant approaches to language (including trans formational-generative grammar) and proposes a new paradigm that can and has bee n applied to a wide range of areas (non-verbal communication, language, teaching

, and other disciplines in the humanities). As part of cognitive linguistics, cognitive grammar develops on the ground of the bipolarity of semantic structures and phonological structures that are sy mbolically connected with each other; and this, as Langacker shows (The Rule Cont roversy: A Cognitive Grammar Approach) is a basic organizational feature that co rrelates directly with the primary function of the language, i.e. that of allowi ng meanings to be symbolized by phonological sequences; being fully reducible to symbolic relationships, cognitive grammar posits that lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a continuum that can be described in terms of symbolic structures; b eing reducible to form-meaning pairings, grammar can be said to be fully symboli c. Bibliography Chomsky, Noam, (1995) The Minimalist Program, Cambridge: The MIT Press; Clark, H.H., (1996) Using Language, Cambridge: Cambridge UP; Croft, William, (2000) Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach, Lon don: Longman; (2002) Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theo ry in Typological Perspective, Oxford: OUP; Cruse, D. Alan, (2000) Meaning in Language: Oxford: OUP; Dirven, R. & M. Verspoor, (1998) Cognitive Explorations of Language and Linguist ics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Evans, Vyvyan & Melanie Green, (2006) Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction, Hi llsdale, NJ: Edinburgh UP; Fauconnier, Gilles, (1985) Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Nat ural Language, Cambridge: The MIT Press; (1997) Mappings in Thought and Language, Ca mbridge: Cambridge UP; and Eve Sweetser (eds), (1996) Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar,Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press; Fodor, J.A., (1975) The Language of Thought, New York: Crowell; (1998) Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Oxford : Clarendon Press; Jackendoff, R., (1992) Language of the Mind, Cambridge: The MIT Press; Johnson-Laird, P. N., (1983) Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge UP; Geeraerts, D. (ed.), (2006) Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, Berlin/New Yo rk: Mouton de Gruyter; Goldberg, Adele E., (1995) Constructions: A Construction Approach to Argument St ructure, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press; (2006) Constructions at Work, New York: OUP; Hudson, Richard, (1990) Word Grammar, Oxford: Blackwell; Johnson, Mark, (1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagina tion and Reason, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press; Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson, (1988) Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York; Basic Books; Langacker, Ronald W., (1987, 1991) Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, III, Stanfor d: Stanford UP; (1990) Concept, Image, and Symbol. T he Cognitive Basis of Grammar, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; Lee, David, (2002) Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction, New York, OUP; Mandler, Jean, (2004) The Doundations of Mind: Origins of conceptual Thought, Ox ford: OUP; Maturana, U., (1970) The Biology of Cognition, Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press; Pinker, S., (1995) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, New Yor k: Harper Perennial; Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (ed.), (1998) Topics in cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam & Phildelphia: John Benjamins;

Shibatani, M. & Sandra Thompson (eds), (1996) Grammatical Constructions: Their F orm and Meaning, Oxford: OUP; Sweetser, E., (1990) From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-as-Body Metaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change, Cambridge: Cambridge UP; Talmy, Leonard, (1988) Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition, Cognitive Science , (12): 49-100; (2000) Toward a Cognitive Semantics, I-II, Cambri dge: The MIT Press; Taylor, John, (2002) Cognitive Grammar, Oxford: OUP; Tomasello, Michael, (1998) The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functio nal Approaches to Language, Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum; Tyler, Andrea & Vyvyan Evans, (2003) The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spat ial, Embodied Meaning and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP; Ungerer, Fr., &H.-J. Schmid, (2006) An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, L ondon: Longman.