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 2

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 3

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 nonlinguistic 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 4

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 5

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 (nonverbal 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