Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Language Study
Distinctive features of the Cognitive Linguistic approach to language study
Draft
John R Taylor and Jeannette Littlemore
To appear in: J Littlemore and J Taylor (eds), Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive
Linguistics. 2014.
1. Defining and positioning Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.
The two key figures who are associated with the inception of Cognitive Linguistics are
George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker. Both, it should be remembered, started their careers as members of a group of young scholars associated with the radical new approach spearheaded by Noam Chomsky. By the 1980s, however, both Lakoff and Langacker were becoming increasingly disaffected with the formalistic approach to syntax
Draft
John R Taylor and Jeannette Littlemore
To appear in: J Littlemore and J Taylor (eds), Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive
Linguistics. 2014.
1. Defining and positioning Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.
The two key figures who are associated with the inception of Cognitive Linguistics are
George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker. Both, it should be remembered, started their careers as members of a group of young scholars associated with the radical new approach spearheaded by Noam Chomsky. By the 1980s, however, both Lakoff and Langacker were becoming increasingly disaffected with the formalistic approach to syntax