Cognitive linguistics：Retrospect and prospect

Cognitive linguistics：Retrospect and prospect

Xu Wen, Kun Yang, Fangtao Kuang

School of Foreign Languages, Southwest University (China)

As a new paradigm of linguistics, cognitive linguistics has made great achievements over the past 30 years or so. In order to make the latest trends of cognitive linguistic research known, this paper presents the outstanding achievements and prominent characteristics of cognitive linguistics in various dimensions. In contrast to some other linguistic theories, cognitive linguistics has more conspicuous advantages in its theories and other aspects. Cognitive linguistics can offer not only an account of linguistic phenomena but also that of a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. Therefore, cognitive linguistics is not only a school of linguistics but is also a cognitive social science or a cognitive semiotics, which can have lots of implications for various fields or disciplines in the age of big data.

Keywords: cognitive linguistics; cognitive grammar; construction grammar; metaphor; metonymy; image schema; grammaticalization; subjectification; constructionalization

1. Introduction

Cognitive linguistics is a new theoretical paradigm of linguistics, which is largely divided into micro cognitive linguistics and macro cognitive linguistics. Any linguistic theory, as long as it takes natural languages as mental phenomena, will belong to macro cognitive linguistics (with “c” in “cognitive” in its lower case, i.e. “cognitive linguistics”). For example, Generative Grammar by Noam Chomsky, Conceptual Semantics by R. Jackendoff and Word Grammar by R. A. Hudson, etc. fall into the category of macro cognitive linguistics. As one kind of macro cognitive linguistics, micro cognitive linguistics (with “C” in “cognitive” capitalized, i.e. “Cognitive Linguistics”) is different from the Chomskyan traditions in dealing with the nature of grammar and the relation between language and human cognition.

Cognitive linguistics has the following major fundamental hypotheses which guide the cognitive approach to the study of language: (1) Language is not an autonomous cognitive faculty but a main part of cognition; (2) Human languages are a list of symbolic units in which forms are conventionally paired with meanings; (3) Meaning is what language is all about; (4) Meaning is conceptualization; (5) Knowledge of language emerges from language use.

Micro Cognitive Linguistics (abbreviated as “Cognitive Linguistics” below) began to emerge in the 1970s and has been increasingly active since the 1980s. The first international cognitive linguistics conference held in Duisburg in the spring of 1989, and the establishment of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA) together with the journal Cognitive Linguistics in 1990, “marked the birth of cognitive linguistics as a broadly grounded, self conscious intellectual movement” (Langacker1990: preface).

Cognitive Linguistics is described as an “enterprise” or a “movement” because it is not a single linguistic theory. Instead it is an approach that has adopted a large number of implications or achievements from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, brain science, and added many new perspectives to the study of language and mind, which improves the scientificity of linguistic studies. It is formed by two commitments: the generalization commitment and the cognitive commitment (Lakoff 1990). This paper will make a general introduction to the current status, main contents, and prominent characteristics of cognitive linguistics.

2. Status quo of Cognitive Linguistics

2.1 The group of researchers

At present, scholars engaged in Cognitive linguistics have expanded all over the world. Among them, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker and Leonard Talmy are honored as the “founding fathers of cognitive linguistics”. They initiated the cognitive linguistics enterprise during the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s.The pioneering work Metaphors We Live By (1980) written by Lakoff and Johnson is said to have enjoyed the greatest sales volume among all western linguistic works and is a true classic on the study of conceptual metaphors. Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987) laid the foundation of studying categorization and cognitive semantics. Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (1987/1991) has depicted a comprehensive theoretical framework for cognitive grammar. Talmy is known as the first linguist who has studied linguistics with insights from Gestalt psychology. Tamly’s Force Dynamics Theory and his later publication Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2000) set an excellent paradigm for the study of the interface between semantics and syntax. Of all the works, Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar are regarded as the “Bible” of cognitive linguistics. Other early representative personages in Cognitive Linguistics include Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs, Adele E. Goldberg, Eve Sweetser, Giles Fauconnier, Willian Croft, Dave Tuggy, Gene Casad, Lauran Janda, Suzanne Kemmer, Sally Rice, Richardo Maldonado, Karen Van Hoek, Geoff Nathan, Margaret Winters, Phyllis Wilcox, Margaret Freeman, et al. Meanwhile, many scholars in western and central Europe, such as Ren Dirven, Dirk Geeraerts, Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, John Taylor (later immigrated to New Zealand), Zoltán Kövecses, Chris Sinha, Klaus-Uwe Panther, Brigitte Nerlich, Arie Verhagen, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Elzbieta Tabakowska, Peter Harder, Günter Radden, Susanne Niemeier, Martin Pütz, Hans-jörg Schmid, Hubert Cuyckens, et al. adopted the common guidelines and assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics and embarked on their research with different perspectives. In the middle of the 1990s, more and more researchers devoted themselves to the campaign of Cognitive Linguistics and most of them were students of the scholars in the first generation, including Alan Cienki, Michel Achard, Joe Grady, Tim Rohrer, Seana Coulson, Todd Oakley, Gary Palmer, Jose M. Garciam-Miguel, Antonio Barcelona, Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza, Carlos Inchaurralde, Andrej Kibrik, Ekateruna Rakhilina, Ted Sanders, Wilbert Spooren, Gerard Steen, Stefan Grondelaers, Stefan Gries, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Yo Matsumoto, et al. In addition, other linguists including Charles Fillmore, Joan Bybee, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, John Haiman, Paul Hopper, and Östen Dahl, Jan Nuyts and psychologists (or psycholinguists) such as Melissa Boweman, Dedre Gentner, Dan Slobin, Michael Tomasello, Elizabeth Bates, and Brian MacWhinney, et al., were