Cognitive Linguistics: An Introductory Sketch

It is probably no exaggeration to say that most contemporary grammatical frameworks take perception, thought, and language to be only tangentially, and not directly, related to one another. In the world view of such theories, these three pillars of the human mind constitute quite different types of knowledge and therefore belong, at least in theory, to distinct parts of our meticulously tidy cognitive architecture: the various sense modules coordinate perceptual input, a central processor handles thought, reasoning, and other executive functions, and the language “metamodule” computes linguistic structures. Such an a-priori philosophical commitment to the well-worn computer metaphor has no doubt been a very productive working strategy. But it is in no way the only plausible conception of the mind that one might adopt in the study of language. Proponents of cognitive linguistics take an alternative approach to the matter. The mind is believed to be structured, to be sure, but the basic assumption is that the relationship between language and other areas of cognition is often very intimate. The body and its perceptual processes serve as an important source of grounding for concept formation and imaginative reasoning, especially, metaphor and metonymy (Johnson 1987, 1991, Lakoff 1986, 1987, Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999).1 Basic cognitive abilities, such as prototype categorization or the imposition of figure/ground alignment, are also held to play a pivotal role in linguistic competence (e.g., Langacker 1987, 1993). Such fundamental abilities may undergo specialization through language usage, but they are not specific to language. Language simply recruits these embodied processes, and builds upon them