Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives
The various contributions: foundations, applications and future perspectives
Go tell it on the mountain
We explore cognitive approaches in the field of anthropological linguistics, now conceived as cultural linguistics, and in language pedagogy, also conceivable as pedagogical linguistics. These two fields both highlight the construal of the world according to multiple cognitive cultural models internalized in childhood and subsequently lived by or learned as new assets of cross-cultural understanding in a given cultural community. The acquisition of language and culture and the interplay between both dimensions thus constitute the main topics. Gary B. Palmer’s chapter, entitled “Energy through fusion at last: Synergies in cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics”, focuses on the positive results of interdisciplinary research and fruitful dialogue: Palmer reviews a series of topics to which both cognitive linguists and cognitive anthropologists have made significant research contributions, namely “language as culture”, “psychological unity vs. cultural diversity”, “distributed knowledge versus consensus in language communities”, “complex categories (reduplication and noun classifiers)”, “the new relativity in spatial orientation” and “the origins of language”. He concludes that Cognitive Linguistics is proving its value by producing insightful applications to the descriptions, analyses, and comparisons of both western and non-western languages and that a version of Cognitive Linguistics that emphasizes the cultural origins of linguistic categories enables cross-linguistic comparisons and insights into both grammar and world view that were unavailable to other paradigms in anthropology or linguistics. Conversely, cognitive linguists could do more to incorporate the frameworks of cognitive anthropology to discover cultural schemas and scenarios and provide additional evidence for proposed cognitive linguistic models.
In their chapter “Cognitive linguistic applications in second or foreign language instruction: Rationale, proposals and evaluation”, Frank Boers and Seth Lindstromberg point out that insights from Cognitive Linguistics have been taken up by education-oriented applied linguistics at a relatively slow pace in spite of the fact that a number of CL premises seem well-suited to complement current language pedagogy research. According to Boers and Lindstromberg, the CL view that appears to have the greatest potential for language pedagogy is its quest for the conceptual motivation of linguistic structures, since the presentation of segments of language as motivated is likely to enhance comprehension, retention, cultural awareness and positive learning effects. The authors survey work based on cognitive insights in second or foreign language teaching and contend that although most controlled experiments reported so far tend to be small-scale ones, taken collectively they begin to constitute a fairly robust body of evidence in favor of a CL-inspired pedagogy. Boers and Lindstromberg conclude by proposing a research agenda consisting of expanding the scope of linguistic motivation, measuring the impact of learner-connected variables on its pedagogical effectiveness and fine-tuning its implementations so as to maximize the pedagogical benefits.
