Concept
Cognitive linguistics
Overview
Cognitive linguistics is an approach to the study of language that encompasses a number of complementary and sometimes overlapping theories. Their defining characteristic is the guiding assumption that linguistic patterns are patterns of conceptualization. Thus, cognitive linguists consider that the study of language provides insight into other human cognitive functions and vice-versa. In this regard, cognitive linguistics challenges generative grammar's hypothesis that some basic linguistic competence is innate and separate from other cognitive faculties. It also objects to truth-conditional semantics's notion that linguistic meaning can be understood in terms of the truth or falsity of a sentence in relation to an external reality.
Cognitive linguistic theories include George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), Ronald Langacker's cognitive grammar, Charles Fillmore's frame semantics, Leonard Talmy's force dynamics, and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's conceptual blending.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Cognitive linguistics is.
Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these categories shows clearly that this analysis consists of a system of primary and secondary relations…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Cognitive linguistics is.
But since it will not be contended that in the acquisition of languages, as ordinarily carried on, these natural relations between words and their meanings are habitually traced, and their laws explained; it must be admitted that they are commonly learned as fortuitous relations. On the other hand, the relations which science presents are causal relations; and, when properly taught, are understood as such. While…
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
States what Cognitive linguistics is.
Philosophers who discussed Cognitive linguistics
Related ideas
- Analogy
- Language acquisition
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Referent
- Noam Chomsky
- Linguistics
- Connectionism
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Embodied cognition
- Generative grammar
- George Lakoff
- Attention
- Emergentism
- Mark Johnson (philosopher)
- Prototype theory
- Functional linguistics
- Cognitive semantics
- Critical discourse analysis
Opposing perspectives
- Artificial intelligence
- Philosophy
- Classification
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Cognitive science
- Anthropology
- Cognitive psychology
- Enactivism
- Phenomenology (philosophy)
- Epistemology
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.