Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last twenty-five years as a powerful approach to the study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition, and general meaning construction. It addresses within language the structuring of basic conceptual categories such as space and time, scenes and events, entities and processes, motion and location, force and causation. It addresses the structuring of ideational and affective categories attributed to cognitive agents, such as attention and perspective, volition and intention. 1 In doing so, it develops a rich conception of grammar that reflects fundamental cognitive abilities: the ability to form structured conceptualizations with multiple levels of organization, to conceive of a situation at varying levels of abstraction, to establish correspondences between facets of different structures, and to construe the same situation in alternate ways. 2 Cognitive linguistics recognizes that the study of language is the study of language use and that when we engage in any language activity, we draw unconsciously on vast cognitive and cultural resources, call up models and frames, set up multiple connections, coordinate large arrays of information, and engage in creative mappings, transfers, and elaborations. Language does not