Cognitive semantics and cognitive approaches to grammar
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C2P48
2025-11-30
23
Cognitive semantics and cognitive approaches to grammar
Having set out some of the fundamental assumptions behind the cognitive approach to language, in this section we briefly map out the field of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguistics can be broadly divided into two main areas: cognitive semantics and cognitive (approaches to) grammar. However, unlike formal approaches to linguistics, which often emphasise the role of grammar, cognitive linguistics emphasises the role of meaning. According to the cognitive view, a model of meaning (a cognitive semantics) has to be delineated before an adequate cognitive model of grammar can be developed. Hence a cognitive grammar assumes a cognitive semantics and is dependent upon it. This is because grammar is viewed within the cognitive framework as a meaningful system in and of itself, which therefore shares important properties with the system of linguistic meaning and cannot be meaningfully separated from it.
The area of study known as cognitive semantics, which is explored in detail in Part II of the book, is concerned with investigating the relationship between experience, the conceptual system and the semantic structure encoded by language. In specific terms, scholars working in cognitive semantics investigate knowledge representation (conceptual structure) and meaning construction (conceptualisation). Cognitive semanticists have employed language as the lens through which these cognitive phenomena can be investigated. It follows that cognitive semantics is as much a model of mind as it is a model of linguistic meaning.
Cognitive grammarians have also typically adopted one of two foci. Scholars like Ronald Langacker have emphasised the study of the cognitive principles that give rise to linguistic organisation. In his theoretical framework Cognitive Grammar, Langacker has attempted to delineate the principles that serve to structure a grammar, and to relate these to aspects of general cognition. Because the term ‘Cognitive Grammar’ is the name of a specific theory, we use the (rather cumbersome) expression ‘cognitive (approaches to) grammar’ as the general term for cognitively oriented models of the language system.
The second avenue of investigation, pursued by researchers including Fillmore and Kay (Fillmore et al. 1988; Kay and Fillmore 1999), Lakoff (1987), Goldberg (1995) and more recently Bergen and Chang (2005) and Croft (2002), aims to provide a more descriptively detailed account of the units that comprise a particular language. These researchers have attempted to provide an inventory of the units of language. Cognitive grammarians who have pursued this line of investigation are developing a collection of theories that can collectively be called construction grammars. This approach takes its name from the view in cognitive linguistics that the basic unit of language is a form-meaning symbolic assembly which, as we saw in Chapter 1, is called a construction.
It follows that cognitive approaches to grammar are not restricted to investigating aspects of grammatical structure largely independently of meaning, as is often the case in formal traditions. Instead, cognitive approaches to grammar encompass the entire inventory of linguistic units defined as form-meaning pairings. These run the gamut from skeletal syntactic configurations like the ditransitive construction we considered earlier, to idioms, to bound morphemes like the -er suffix, to words. This entails that the received view of clearly distinct ‘sub-modules’ of language cannot be meaningfully upheld within cognitive linguistics, where the boundary between cognitive semantics and cognitive (approaches to) grammar is less clearly defined. Instead, meaning and grammar are seen as two sides of the same coin: to take a cognitive approach to grammar is to study the units of language and hence the language system itself. To take a cognitive approach to semantics is to attempt to understand how this linguistic system relates to the conceptual system, which in turn relates to embodied experience. The concerns of cognitive semantics and cognitive (approaches to) grammar are thus complementary. This idea is represented in Figure 2.3. The organisation of this book reflects the fact that it is practical to divide up the study of cognitive linguistics into these two areas for purposes of teaching and learning. However, this should not be taken as an indication that these two areas of cognitive linguistics are independent areas of study or research.
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