A curious thing happened to me recently. I was revisited by a graduate student from the linguistics department who had taken my course in cognitive linguistics six years ago. The son of a famous German linguist, with all the benefits of both European and American educations, this young man was unusually erudite and a pleasure in class because of the comparisons he could draw among linguistic tr...

The purpose of this chapter is to describe some similarities, as well as differences, between theoretical proposals emanating from the tradition of phenomenology and the currently popular approach to language and cognition known as cognitive linguistics (hence CL). This is a rather demanding and potentially controversial topic. For one thing, neither CL nor phenomenology constitute monolithic t...

Cognitive linguistics brought about changes starting from reshaping our approach to metaphors. Our bodily experience in space serves as the basis for the majority of metaphorical expressions and the present article focuses on some of the English, Romanian and Hungarian prepositions/verbal prefixes, such as over, peste, túl, végig. Their basic meaning(s) can be more easily understood resorting t...

Cognitive linguistics gives the most inclusive, consistent description of how language is organized, used and learned to date. Cognitive linguistics contains a great number of concepts that are useful to second language learners.  If-clauses in English, on the other hand, remain intriguing for foreign language learners to struggle with, due to their intrinsic intricacies. EFL grammar books are ...

This volume offers a superb collection of fourteen articles on a wide range of interrelated topics within cognitive linguistics. Living fully up to its ambitious title, the book is based upon the keynote talks and papers presented at the “Converging and Diverging Tendencies in Cognitive Linguistics” conference, held in Dubrovnik (Croatia) in 2005, as well as a couple of papers that have been co...

Different from traditional linguistics which views metaphor as a means of rhetoric, cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor, instead of being a deviant phenomenon of normal language, is a way of thought and a powerful instrument of cognition. Because of the reason that the traditional linguistics failed to explain the essence of metaphor, the modern linguists began to do research on it from t...

XX. yüzyılın ikinci yarısından itibaren dilde insan merkezli yaklaşımların ortaya çıkmasıyla dil, bilişsel yaklaşımlar çerçevesinde incelenmeye başlanır. Dil, düşünce ve üçlüsünün birbirine sıkı sıkıya bağlı kavramlar olduğundan hareket eden bilim araştırmacıları, insanın zihinsel süreçlerini incelerken bilinç yapısını ifade etme aracı olan dile yönelirler dolayısıyla bilimler dilbilimle kesişi...