Cognitive Metaphor and Empirical Methods∗

In the intellectual marketplace, different theories of language compete among themselves vying for their niche. One effective way of achieving such a goal is by offering some distinctive feature that makes them stand out from the rest. Such a ’difference’ can rest on several grounds: for example, a specific methodology specially suited to the study of a particular linguistic level (e.g. morphology), a new perspective from which to look at linguistic phenomena (e.g. by combining insights from two different disciplines, say, linguistics and sociology), etc. Cognitive linguistics (henceforth, CL) is a theory of language that attempts to describe language in connection to the rest of cognition. This aspiration was explicitly formulated by one of the founders of the movement, George Lakoff. In his “Cognitive Commitment” (Lakoff 1990: 40), he emphasized the need to provide an account of language that was consistent with what other cognitive science disciplines (neuroscience, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, etc) have revealed about cognition and the brain. Put in another way, linguists need to take empirical evidence from other cognitive sciences seriously. This very same point has also been stressed by Gibbs (1996) when commenting on the adjective cognitive in CL: