What do linguists do?
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C1P15
2025-11-23
33
What do linguists do?
As we have begun to see, cognitive linguists form hypotheses about the nature of language, and about the conceptual system that it is thought to reflect. These hypotheses are based on observing patterns in the way language is structured and organised. It follows that a theory of language and mind based on linguistic observation must first describe the linguistic facts in a systematic and rigorous manner, and in such a way that the description provides a plausible basis for a speaker’s tacit knowledge of language. This foundation for theorising is termed descriptive adequacy (Chomsky 1965; Langacker 1987,1999a). This concern is one that cognitive linguists share with linguists working in other traditions. Below, we provide an outline of what it is that linguists do and how they go about it.
What?
Linguists try to uncover the systems behind language, to describe these systems and to model them. Linguistic models consist of theories about language. Linguists can approach the study of language from various perspectives. Linguists may choose to concentrate on exploring the systems within and between sound, meaning and grammar, or to focus on more applied areas, such as the evolution of language, the acquisition of language by children, language disorders, the questions of how and why language changes over time, or the relationship between language, culture and society. For cognitive linguists, the emphasis is upon relating the systematicity exhibited by language directly to the way the mind is patterned and structured, and in particular to conceptual structure and organisation. It follows that there is a close relationship between cognitive linguistics and aspects of cognitive psychology. In addition to this, applied linguistics also informs and is informed by the cognitive linguistics research agenda in various ways.
Why?
Linguists are motivated to explore the issues we outlined above by the drive to understand human cognition, or how the human mind works. Language is a uniquely human capacity. Linguistics is therefore one of the cognitive sciences, alongside philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Each of these disciplines seeks to explain different (and frequently overlapping) aspects of human cognition. In particular, as we have begun to see, cognitive linguists view language as a system that directly reflects conceptual organization.
How?
As linguists, we rely upon what language tells us about itself. In other words, it is ordinary language, spoken every day by ordinary people, that makes up the ‘raw data’ that linguists use to build their theories. Linguists describe language, and on the basis of its properties, formulate hypotheses about how language is represented in the mind. These hypotheses can be tested in a number of ways.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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