The Cognitive Linguistic Enterprise
The Cognitive Linguistics Enterprise: An Overview* Vyvyan Evans, Benjamin K. Bergen and Jörg Zinken
[In press for 2006. To be published in ‘The Cognitive Linguistics Reader’, by Equinox Publishing Company]
1. Introduction Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought and practice. It is concerned with investigating the relationship between human language, the mind and socio-physical experience. It originally emerged in the 1970s (Fillmore 1975, Lakoff & Thompson 1975, Rosch 1975) and arose out of dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language which were dominant, at that time, in the disciplines of linguistics and philosophy. While its origins were, in part, philosophical in nature, cognitive linguistics has always been strongly influenced by theories and findings from the other cognitive sciences as they emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly cognitive psychology.1 Nowhere is this clearer than in work relating to human categorization, particularly as adopted by Charles Fillmore in the 1970s (e.g., Fillmore 1975) and George Lakoff in the 1980s (e.g., Lakoff 1987). Also of importance have been earlier traditions such as Gestalt psychology, as applied notably by Leonard Talmy (e.g., 2000) and Ronald Langacker (e.g., 1987). Finally, the neural underpinnings of language and cognition have had longstanding influence on the character and content of cognitive linguistic theories, from early work on how visual biology constrains colour terms systems (Kay and McDaniel 1978) to more recent work under the rubric of the Neural Theory of Language (Gallese and Lakoff 2005). In recent years, cognitive linguistic theories have become sufficiently sophisticated
We are grateful to Michael Israel, George Lakoff and Chris Sinha for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 For a review of historical antecedents of cognitive linguistics see Nerlich and Clarke (In press).
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2 and detailed to begin making predictions that are testable
[In press for 2006. To be published in ‘The Cognitive Linguistics Reader’, by Equinox Publishing Company]
1. Introduction Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought and practice. It is concerned with investigating the relationship between human language, the mind and socio-physical experience. It originally emerged in the 1970s (Fillmore 1975, Lakoff & Thompson 1975, Rosch 1975) and arose out of dissatisfaction with formal approaches to language which were dominant, at that time, in the disciplines of linguistics and philosophy. While its origins were, in part, philosophical in nature, cognitive linguistics has always been strongly influenced by theories and findings from the other cognitive sciences as they emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly cognitive psychology.1 Nowhere is this clearer than in work relating to human categorization, particularly as adopted by Charles Fillmore in the 1970s (e.g., Fillmore 1975) and George Lakoff in the 1980s (e.g., Lakoff 1987). Also of importance have been earlier traditions such as Gestalt psychology, as applied notably by Leonard Talmy (e.g., 2000) and Ronald Langacker (e.g., 1987). Finally, the neural underpinnings of language and cognition have had longstanding influence on the character and content of cognitive linguistic theories, from early work on how visual biology constrains colour terms systems (Kay and McDaniel 1978) to more recent work under the rubric of the Neural Theory of Language (Gallese and Lakoff 2005). In recent years, cognitive linguistic theories have become sufficiently sophisticated
We are grateful to Michael Israel, George Lakoff and Chris Sinha for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 For a review of historical antecedents of cognitive linguistics see Nerlich and Clarke (In press).
*
2 and detailed to begin making predictions that are testable
References: 58 Montague, Richard (1970). ‘Universal grammar’. Theoria 36, 373-398. Montague, Richard (1973). ‘The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English’