Cognitive Linguistics; Cognitive Grammar

3.1. History
3.2. Definitions; Characterizations
3.3. Cognitive Linguistics
3.4. Cognitive Grammar
3.5. Overview

3.1.History

Though Noam Chomsky is often quoted as one whose work contributed to the foundation
of cognitive science, cognitive linguistics as such grew out of ideas that were in direct
opposition to Chomskyan linguistics in the 1970s. Thus, one branch of cognitive linguistics,
construction grammar (William Croft, Michael Tomasello, Laura Jaunda) is developed
upon a conceptual framework that, (1) exposes the flaws 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) almost denies the existence of syntax (and, thus, of Syntactic
Structures. According to these new positions, children do not first acquire syntactic
structures which they then furnish with various sets of verbs, but rather they acquire the
individual verbs first and then associate them with some constructions, and the
constructions for one verb are not transferable to other verbs. Such scholars as Charles
Filmore, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard Talmy were among the first to propose and
agree that Chomsky was wrong in assuming that meaningthe result of interpretationis
peripheral to the study of language, and that syntax functions according 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 linguistics; all linguistic units are meaningful
and the complex relationships (in the human 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-topological linguistics--, all of
them also defending the position that language should be studied with reference to its
cognitive, experiential, and social contexts, all 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 number of cognitively oriented researchers (Elizabeth Bates,
Eve Clark, Dan Sobin) studied acquisition empirically and saw the problem as one of
learning, once again rejecting Chomskys claim of the innateness of the linguistic capacity.
In the 1980s, frame semantics and construction grammar (Talmy, Langacker, Lakoff)
develop Oscar Ducrots and Gilles Fauconniers theory of mental spaces and then that of
conceptual blending (with Mark Turner as an important exponent); there are more and
more adherents in America and around the world, the first conference of Cognitive
Linguistics is organized in 1989, and the first issue of the journal Cognitive Linguistics is
published in 1990; in the 2000s the number of cognitive linguists can be counted by the
hundreds, and bibliographical lists are already 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 linguists is given by
Dirk Geeraerts in J. Verschueren et als, eds. (1995) Handbook of Pragmatics, p.112:

Because cognitive linguistics sees language as embedded in the overall cognitive

capacities of man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the structural
characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality, systematic
polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery and metaphor); the functional principles of
linguistic organization (such as iconicity and naturalness); the conceptual interface
between syntax and semantics ( as explored by cognitive grammar and construction
grammar); the experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-use; and the
relationship between language and thought, including questions about relativism and
conceptual universals.

Once again, the theoretical assumptions of generative linguistics are regarded as

insufficiently grounded: all linguistic units have meaningful semantic structures and
linguistic forms are designed to express these semantic structures; thus cognitive linguistics
takes language creation and development, language learning 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 knowledge of language, in children or adults, arises
out of language use; linguistic cognition occupies no special place among other forms of
cognition and the phenomenon of linguistic cognition is a unified one within consciousness,
so that borders 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 our organs of
perception and senses: up/down, near/far, over/under, hard/soft; which 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 sources and
inspiration), psychology and neuro-psychology as well as artificial intelligence studies,
cognitive linguistics can as yet be best described as a trend or movement, assumptions and
methods resulting in quite a number of different but convergent theories. As already
suggested, one premise is based upon the acceptance of some general principles that apply
to all aspects of the language; previous formal linguistics (including Chomsky), as is too
well known, dedicated special chapters and specific types of effort to the study of sound,
words and sentences, sentence structure and organization, morphology, or discourse study;
human mind appears here as modular and the components of language are distinct and
should be studied distinctly; for cognitive linguists there is a common set of human
cognitive abilities that gives birth to linguistic knowledge as a whole. And thus the cognitive
linguistic approach may be regarded as vertical (across layers of linguistic organization,
from top to bottom, through sound structure, lexicon, syntactic organizations)rather
than horizontal (each layer individually and on its own terms).
Another premise is that the general principles of language should be studied
interdisciplinarily, on the basis of whatever information can be found in other researches
about the brain and the mind; the human cognitive system is, in this view, a unified one
and linguistic theories have got to observe these processes and structures like any other
theories in philosophy, brain sciences, cognitive neuroscience and so on; components of any
model of investigation should come from convergent evidence for the reality being studied;
so generalizations are used to transcend specific cognitive domains; conceptual blending,
for instance, implies that the same principles apply to grammatical constructions, to
metaphor, and framing; such generalizations are important in understanding how
language relates to general cognition.
And the reality above is made up of language and the mind, which we can substitute for
their near synonyms knowledge and consciousness; then knowledge and any or all sets of
mental structures, and, finally, the relationship between knowledge and sign (language is a
sign system designed or developed for categorizing, storing, retrieving, and processing
information, which is, of course, the computational metaphor of mind, a metaphor on
which most modern theories of cognition 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 encoded 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 encoding sender
encoded messagedecoding receiver has come to be challenged by the new assumption
that language is connotational rather than denotational, and so the concept of a consensual
domain between speaker and listener became necessary; the speakers and listeners
background knowledge affects coategorical decisions and the acquisition o f new concepts
during this transfer of information/knowledge; the experience of our environment,
moreover, affects the on-going process of object recognition and categorization; so what
is necessaryand cognitive scientists have agreed 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, the computational metaphor of the mind will define language as a
specific consensual environmental domain serving as a cognitive interface with the world;
thus, an interface that is consensual, environmental, highly specific, interactive, and
cognitive; consensual in that you are not a Japanese physicist who accepts to go and
address , in Japanese, a French audience of old ladies interested in feminism, nor that you
are a listener who makes a similarly unusual; choice; the environment would include the
communication medium, the domain expertise, the type of communicative code, etc.;
specificity is a term we generally use to point to particulars we cannot always define;
interactivein the sense that much of the meaning may be provided by the coder; and
cognitive covering knowledge and consciousness.
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 service of constructing and
communicating meaning, being, at the same time, a possibility of looking at how the mind
functions; so it is not only the cognition in the language, but the cognition that lies behind
the language that matters, because 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 Foundation 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
cognitive resources: this backstage cognition includes view points and reference points,
figure-ground/profile-base/landmark-trajector organization, metaphorical, analogical, and
other mappings, idealized models, framing, construal, mental spaces, 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 to non-
linguistic cognition as well as to the contextual aspects of language use: thus, language in
context, discourse, inferences drawn by the participants in the exchange, assumptions,
frames, etc.; in other words, descriptions and analyses of full and complex contexts in
which the energy of meaning construction can be observed and evaluated; and this can be
primarily done by noticing the complexity of this process of meaning construction in
contrast with the simplicity or brevity of the linguistic expression; the consensual
mentioned above points to a relative 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, plus
the physical and mental context; the fact that meaning is in the language forms alone is an
illusion relegated to the past and to folk theories.
Meaning is mostly in this backstage cognition, whichagaindoes not follow
different operations that apply to various levels of linguistic analysis (semantics, syntax,
etc.); rather, it operates uniformly at all levels; as an example, metaphor 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 organization, mental space connections, prototypes, schemas and
frames, conceptual blending and analogy, force dynamics, (Leonard Talmy) and fictive
motion; ;hence the remarkable generalizations uncovered by cognitive linguists across
linguistic levels, from morphemes and words to sentence, its context, and whole discourse;
linguistics is no longer a number of various accounts about the different properties of one
or several languages, but a meansprobably the most powerful oneof opening a window
into general cognition.

3.4. Cognitive Grammar

We have already noted that in cognitive linguistics the boundary between cognitive
approaches to semantics on one hand and to grammar on the other is not clearly defined,
meaning and grammar being seen as complementary and interdependent; a cognitive
approach to semantics means understanding how the linguistic systemstudies by
cognitive grammarrelates to our conceptual system; in its turn, this conceptual system
relates to embodied experience. So cognitive grammar consists in the 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, as in many traditional formal grammars; one central
idea is that of a lexicon-grammar continuum, in which both a content word and a
grammatical construction count 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 signifier (the phonological/graphic pole) and a signified (the semantic pole), both of
which 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 the
language is formed by abstracting the above symbolic units from instances of language use;
thus, there seems to be no distinction between competence (knowledge of language) and
performance (use of language), knowledge of language being knowledge 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) offer a
classification of the major theories and approaches to types of cognitive grammars, 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 language and its grammatical subsystem: the
lexical subsystem is made up of open-class elements, which are highly rich in terms of
content, and closed-class elements (grammatical), which encode schematic or structural
meaning. His relevant example of closed-class elements is that while most languages have
nominal inflections (dual or plural) to indicate number, no nominal inflections exist in any
language for color, i.e. there are no grammatical affixes to indicate blueness (the intricate
problem of qualia). In Talmys views, the grammatical closed-class system 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 forms, while there is a restricted inventory of
concepts expressible by lexical forms (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 volumes
(published in 1987 and 1991) of Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Langacker follows
Talmy in arguing that grammatical, closed-class units are inherently meaningful, 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 stored (cognitive routine) and accessed
as a whole, rather than being built compositionally by the language system; these units are
conventional and are shared among the members of a speech community (some of them,
like dog, are more conventional, i.e. share by the quasi-totality of the members, while
others are less conventional, 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
their symbolic structures, while others, like words, phrases or whole sentences, are complex
constructions. Finally, the symbolic units are not stored in the mind in a random way, but
ones whole inventory is structured according to relationships established between and
among units; some units may be subparts of other units (morphemes make up words,
words make up phrases, phrases and words make up sentences), so that there is a set of
interlinking and overlapping relationships conceived as networks; and there are schemas in
terms of which knowledge of linguistic patterns is conceived.
 A thir category is that of constructional approaches to grammar, represented, first, by
Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, Mary Katherine OConnor, and Beryl T. Atkins (1975-1992,
see the edition of Frames, Fields and Contrasts, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992). Their
position is, obviously, that grammar can be modeled in terms of constructions rather than
words and rules; a grammatical construction, like kick the bucket, has a meaning or
meanings that cannot be understood or explained on the basis of their components, so it
has to be stored whole, rather than built step by step. Another model of construction
grammar is that proposed by the same group of linguists, with the similar principle that
syntactic, semantic, phonological and pragmatic knowledge is represented in constructions
(like let alone), where all the information is contained in a simple unified representation.
Another development is proposed by Adele Goldberg (Constructions: A Construction
Grammar Approach to Argument Structure, Chicago: Chicago U.P., 1995), who, by
obviously focusing on verb argument constructions, manages to prove that sentence-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 Typological
Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2002) and D. Allan Cruse explore linguistic typology
in terms of similarity and diversity; their aim is to develop a model of language that
combines typological insights with a meaning-based model of language structure (see
supra); instead of grammatical universals in all the worlds languages, which assumes a
formal universal grammar, it is grammatical diversity that should be taken as a starting
point in building a model that accounts for typological variation; rather than place the
emphasis on generalization, Croft 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 Benjamin
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. developing a formal
language to describe, first, the constructions in a certain language and, secondly, how these
constructions give rise to embodied concepts in dynamic language comprehension.
Finally, Evans, Bergen and Zinken mention cognitive approaches to grammaticalization,
i.e. the process of language change by which closed-class, grammatical 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 understanding of

other types of investigations into the acquiring and transmission of human language and a
new understanding of how language works. By investigating the relationships between
language, mind, and socio=physical experience, cognitive linguistics rejects former
dominant approaches to language (including transformational-generative grammar) and
proposes a new paradigm that can and has been 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 symbolically
connected with each other; and this, as Langacker shows (The Rule Controversy: A
Cognitive Grammar Approach) is a basic organizational feature that correlates directly
with the primary function of the language, i.e. that of allowing 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; being reducible to form-meaning pairings,
grammar can be said to be fully symbolic.

DRAGOS AVADANEI -COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES, Ed.

Universitas XXI, Iai, 2010