Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives
The various contributions: foundations, applications and future perspectives
The cognitive base
This opening critically surveys the groundwork of Cognitive Linguistics, whose main ambition it is to be a fully usage-based theory of language. In his chapter entitled “Methodology in Cognitive Linguistics”, Dirk Geeraerts examines the methodological consequences of this tenet and weighs the validity of various linguistic research methods leading to the realization of this ambition. Geeraerts first assesses the actual situation in Cognitive Linguistics and concludes that it is a mixed picture, with a clearly growing interest in empirical methods on the one hand, but still a dominance of traditionally analytic approaches on the other. Adopting a constructive approach, he foresees a growing increase in the empirical demands on linguistics: corpus research, experimental designs, surveys, and the accompanying forms of quantitative data analysis are likely to occupy a more central position than it currently does, gradually raising the standards of scholarship in linguistics in general and in Cognitive Linguistics in particular to such a level that unsubstantiated claims will become unfashionable. Linguistics needs an empirical revolution, and empirical research, Geeraerts argues, does not involve abandoning theory formation in favor of purely descriptive research, but rather trying to provide proof for theories, and from there, refining the theories. Interpretation is thus viewed as but one step within a cycle of empirical and successful research, which, crucially, requires the operationalization of hypotheses.
Many traditional dichotomies such as competence versus performance, or lexicon versus grammar are irreconcilable with a usage-based description of language. In the chapter “Polysemy and the lexicon”, John R. Taylor looks at this continuum from the lexicon perspective, and revisits several questions which earlier CL models have treated in the form of radial networks (the extreme polysemy of ‘over’, for example). In the case of ‘over’, Taylor argues that attempts to determine just how many meanings a word has, and what these meanings might be are ultimately based on a particular model, viz. the “dictionary + grammar book” conception of language. Taylor argues that such a conception is undermined by the pervasiveness of the idiomatic and illustrates his claim with an easily repeatable, small-sized corpus-based study of some uses of the expression all over. He shows that the expression has a range of uses which cannot be derived on the basis of independently identifiable meanings of its parts, and concludes that knowing a word proceeds through knowledge of the highly flexible usage range of the word, rather than through the association of the word with a fixed number of determinate meanings.
One major application of CL is likely to be in the area of linguistic descriptions of parts or even the whole of grammar, of single languages or, contrastively, across different languages. “Cognitive approaches to grammar”, by Cristiano Broccias, outlines the development of CL grammar models and compares three CL grammar models: Langacker’s cognitive grammar (Langacker 2005), and Goldberg’s (Goldberg 1995) and Croft’s (Croft 2001) avenues into construction grammar. Finally, we explore the descriptive complementary potential of mental space theory and blending theory for the representation of conceptual links in grammatical complexity. As Broccias points out, the similarities between the models described are so fundamental that they can be called “notational variants”: they all share the assumption that language must be studied in relation to other cognitive abilities and agree on the fact that language consists of far more than just a syntax plus a lexicon. Rather, language is viewed as a taxonomic hierarchy, where sharp distinctions should not be assumed; language is a “diffuse” network since much in language is a matter of degree.
