Gilles Fauconier - Cognitive linguistics.pdf - filologia angielska - L-ka

Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science

Cognitive Linguistics

Gilles Fauconnier

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

"represent" meaning; it prompts for the construction of meaning in particular

contexts with particular cultural models and cognitive resources. Very sparse

grammar guides us along the same rich mental paths, by prompting us to

perform complex cognitive operations. Thus, a large part of cognitive linguistics

centers on the creative on-line construction of meaning as discourse unfolds in

context. 3 The dividing line between semantics and pragmatics dissolves and

truth-conditional compositionality disappears.

Aspects of language and expression that had been consigned to the

rhetorical periphery of language, such as metaphor 4 and metonymy, 5 are

redeemed and rehabilitated within cognitive linguistics. They are understood to

be powerful conceptual mappings at the very core of human thought, important

not just for the understanding of poetry, but also science, mathematics, religion,

philosophy, and everyday speaking and thinking. 6

Importantly, thought and language are embodied. Conceptual structure

arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural structures that give rise

to it. The structure of concepts includes prototypes; reason is embodied and

imaginative. A grammar is ultimately a neural system. The properties of

grammars are the properties of humanly embodied neural systems. 7 Cognitive

capacities that play a fundamental role in the organization of language are not

specific to language. Such capacities include analogy, recursion, viewpoint and

perspective, figure-ground organization, and conceptual integration. 8

The stage was set for cognitive linguistics in the nineteen seventies and

early eighties with Len Talmy's work on figure and ground, Ronald Langacker's

cognitive grammar framework, George Lakoff's research on metaphor, gestalts,

categories and prototypes, 9 Fillmore's frame semantics, 10 and Fauconnier's mental

spaces. 11 Today, there are hundreds of scholars who work in this paradigm, and

there is a huge amount of published research on the theories and their

applications. The present short encyclopedia entry cannot do justice to the

wealth of discoveries, empirical studies, and applications that have come out of

this recent tradition. I give in the bibliography some indications of where to get

a more detailed picture. 12 In the following sections, I outline some of the

fundamental themes that run through cognitive linguistics.

I. Grammar and Cognition

The relation of grammar to cognition is studied in exquisite detail in the

foundational work of Talmy (2000) and Langacker (1987, 1991). Talmy shows the

great restrictions on the conceptual categories that grammatical systems actually

specifiy. For example number, but not color, and within number, 'singular',

'dual', 'plural', but never 'even', 'odd', 'dozen' or 'numerable'. Topological

reference ('across the sky,' 'across the table,'), but not Euclidean reference.

Multiplexing, states of boundedness and dividedness. Axiality, perspective ( The

door slowly opened and two men walked in vs. Two men slowly opened the door and

walked in ), sequentializing ( There are some houses in the valley vs. There is a house

now and then in the valley ), viewing, and nesting.

Langacker shows how grammar imposes trajector/landmark organization

on scenes and events ( The table is below the lamp and The lamp is above the table

express the same spatial relation with trajector and landmark reversed).

Profiling is another important construct of Langacker's cognitive grammar: the

word hypotenuse evokes a right triangle and profiles a particular part of it: the

same segment without the rest of the triangle is no longer a hypotenuse. In I

melted it , melt profiles an entire action chain with causation and change leading

to a liquid state. In It melted easily , only the change is profiled, although the

causation is still evoked. In It is finally melted , only the resultant state is profiled,

but the unprofiled change is evoked. Langacker analyzes in considerable detail

the ways in which component structures are integrated through correspondences

and elaboration to form composite structures: a phonological integration (e.g.

the English jar lid ) symbolizes the semantic integration of 'jar' and 'lid'. 13

Other key aspects of conceptual structuring as reflected by grammar, and

found in language after language, 14 include fictive motion ( The blackboard goes all

the way to the wall ), event integration ( The ball rolled in , The candle blew out , I kicked

the door shut ), and force dynamics ( The ball kept rolling , He refrained from closing the

door ), and the application of force dynamics to abstract reasoning and felicity

conditions on speech acts. 15

Fascinating linguistically and psychologically is the way in which

language structures space. No two languages are ever alike in this respect,

although the general principles remain the same. Each of us in his or her own

language carves out physical space in fantastically intricate ways, of which we

are not aware. Deceptively simple looking prepositions like in , out , over, define

elaborate networks of spatial meaning with hundreds of linked schemas, some of

which are prototypical and central. Compare The plane flew over the field , The

post-office is over the hill , The log rolled over , The party is over , He had to do it over , He

overlooked it, He looked it over, He oversaw it . Remarkable work on this topic has

been done by cognitive linguists 16 and explicit computational models 17 have

confirmed the staggering cognitive complexity of the human capacity to

structure space linguistically. Regier (1996), who built a structured connectionist

model capable of learning subsets of such relations for different languages shows

that many aspects of neurobiology, conceptualization, and general learning are at

play.

II. Metaphor theory

A second strand of fundamental work in cognitive linguistics which

interacts constantly with the first is the considerable development of metaphor

theory over the last twenty years. Launched by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), this

line of research rests on the key insight that far from being a rhetorical flourish,

metaphor is basic and constitutive for all the thinking that we do, and that in the

scheme of evolution, metaphor, based on source domains of human experience

and neural connections to our embodied sensations, actions, and emotions, is

what creates the possibility of 'abstract' reasoning, scientific and mathematical

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