Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Language Study

It has its origins in the sass as a advised reaction to Chomsky linguistics, tit its emphasis on formalistic syntactic abstract and its underlying assumption that phraseology is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was startle to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of Information ab pop the world, and that the same cognitive processes be affect In language as argon Involved In other forms of computeing.For example, In our everyday lives, we look at things from respectful angles, we get up close to them or further away and weigh them from polar vantage points and with efferent levels of granularity we assess the relative features of our purlieu and decide which atomic number 18 important and need to be attended to and which are less(prenominal) important and need to be backgrounder we lump information together, discriminate and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new e nvironments when we encounter them.As we ordain see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too. The two key figures who are confrered with the inception of Cognitive philology are George Alaska and Ronald linebacker. Both, t should be remembered, started their careers as members of a group of novel scholars associated with the radical new approach spearheaded by NOAA Chomsky. By the sass, however, both Alaska and Linebacker were becoming increasingly disaffected with the formalistic approach to syntax associated with the Chomsky school.Both scholars dark their attention, Instead, to semantic Issues, which had been relatively neglected within the Chomsky framework. Alaska raised unfathomed questions with envision to objectivism SE antics that is, theories which maintained that entente importee maps onto objectively verifiable states of personal business in the world. He argued, instead, that semantic content is mediated by how speakers go steady and c in one caseptualize the world. An important aspect of construal is how we categorize the things in our environment.Taking up the design of prototype category developed by cognitive psychologist Eleanor Roach, Alaska argued that words do not name classically defined categories, that Is, categories constituted by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, entitles can be good, or less good, members of a category. In a crucial and highly influential move, Alaska past proposed that the a syntactic construction, might similarly be analyses in scathe of a central, prototypical member, and a number of extended, or much peripheral construction senses.A noteworthy milestone here is the dissertation by one of Alaska s students, Claudia Bergman, on the polymers of the preposition (Bergman, 1981). Bergman argued that t he central, prototypical sense combines the meanings of above and across, as in The madam flew over the yard . Extended senses, related in virtue of few commo n shared features, include the above sense , as in the electric car is hovering over the hill, the across sense, as in Sam drove over the keep going , the covering sense She spread the tablecloth over the table, the dispersal sense, as in The guards were stick on all over the hill , and several more.Bargemans thesis (presented in Alaska 1987 pillow slip Study 2) not only inspired a plethora of -studies, it also provided a template for polymers studies more generally. La Coffs import main theatrical role was to id entity a number of conceptual similes that underlie our abstract concepts and the way we think about the world and ourselves (Alaska and Johnson 1980, 1999).For example, one of the most important conceptual metaphors is the thinking that good or active things are up whereas bad or static things are down, which allows us to say that were spot IoW or having down time, that things are or that that they are up and going . This metaphor was taken to reflect our basic ex perience with the world that we have as children when we fall over we feel bad when we lie down we are stationary, when we get up we are active, and when we are feeling good, we literally expect tall.As discussed in a later chapter, conceptual metaphor theory has receive in for a good agree of criticism in novel years and the theory has been refined to take account of empirical psycholinguistic findings as well as more socio-cultural approaches to language, but the basic tenets bide the same language tends to reflect our physical interactions with the world and abstract concepts are linked to physical experiences through metaphor. Linebackers contribution is perhaps more fundamental than Lassoes .His Cognitive Grammar (Linebacker 1987, 1991, 2008) offers a radical re-think of basic issues concerning the nature of linguistic meaning and its relation to the surface form of utterances. He proposed a minimalist approach, whereby the only elements in linguistic description are (a) ph onological representations, concerning the overt form of an cheek (whether spoken, written, or signed), (b) semantic representations, roughly, meanings, broadly understood to include prosaic, situational, and encyclopedic aspects, and (c) emblematical relations between elements of (a) and elements of (b).On this basis, a language comes to be characterized, quite simply, as an inventory of phonological, semantic, and symbolic social units, and language acquisition is a matter of a speakers increasing command of these units. Importantly, the units differ along a number of dimensions. gum olibanum most units are internally complex, while others are stately to some degree or other.For example, the demeanor can-opener is internally complex, while the component unit can is an instance of the more schematic unit Noun, the whole expression being an instance of the complex schematic unit N V- ere and its associated semantics (roughly a device that can be used for V- ins Ins). The sc hematic unit can countenance an open-ended set of instantiations in this way, Cognitive Grammar is bled to handle syntactic and geomorphological generalizations.It should also be noted that the unit has other semantic value (think of examples such as dog-lover , which denotes a person, not a thing, and , where the initial noun designates the determine where a person dwells) in other words, the unit is polygamous, Just wish the words of a language. The mechanics of Cognitive Grammar are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this volume. Three aspects, however, may be singled out for special mention here The first concerns the way in which grammaticality (or acceptability- cognitive insists see little reason to distinguish the two concepts) is to be understood.Grammaticality, namely, has to do with the extent to which an expression is sanctioned, or legitimated, by an already existing schematic unit, or possibly by several such units, in the language the fit, needless to say, need not be perfect, neither will different speakers of the language always assess the matter in the same way. * The second observation concerns the idea that syntactic organization is inherently symbolic and then meaningful, and that syntactic structures Just like individual words ND morphemes associate a form and meaning.An early indicative study concerned the resistless construction in English (Linebacker, 1982). Rather than being seen as the final result of syntactic transformations, the construction and its various components, such as the verb be the communicative participle, and the by phrase, were argued to have semantic content, which contribute cumulatively to the semantic and pragmatic value of the passive construction. Thirdly, the Cognitive Grammar approach is sympathetic to the notion that linguistic knowledge, rather than residing in a small number of very road, high-ranking abstractions, may actually be rather low-level and surface oriented, consisting in multiple m emories of already encountered usage and relatively shallow generalizations over these remembered instances.In pragmatic terms, this means that linguistic knowledge will tend to be focus on on individual lexical items and their idiosyncratic properties, concerning the syntactic environments in which they go along and their stylistic or pragmatic values. Similarly, the representation of syntactic and word-formation constructions will bear knowledge of the lexical items which typically occur in hem, in addition, once again, to information about the kinds of situations in which they are likely to be used.Although it represents a radical departure in some ways from many open ideas in linguistics (such as the formerly widely held view that syntax, semantics and pragmatics were generally independent of one another), the principles underlying Cognitive Linguistics resonated with many handed-down concerns one thinks of classics such as Gustavo Steers Meaning and Change of Meaning (193 1), C. S. Lewdest Studies in Words (1960), and various works by Stephan Almsman (e. G. , Almsman, 1964)