This course provides an overview of cognitive linguistics, an approach to language which emphasizes general cognitive principles. It covers cognitive approaches to meaning, such as frame semantics, conceptual metaphor theory, image schemas and conceptual blending. Cognitive approaches to grammar, such as Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar, are also introduced. The course aims to provide students with a solid grounding in the key phenomena and theoretical devices of cognitive linguistics, as well as an understanding of how cognitive linguistics relates to other frameworks.
This book presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed over the course of three decades. Starting with the fundamentals, essential aspects of the theory are systematically laid out with concrete illustrations and careful discussion of their rationale. Among the topics surveyed are conceptual semantics, grammatical classes, grammatical constructions, the lexicon-grammar continuum characterized as assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings), and the usage- based account of productivity, restrictions, and well-formedness. The theory's central claim - that grammar is inherently meaningful - is thereby shown to be viable.
Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are “metaphors we live by”—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In this updated edition, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language.
This book is about the traditional answers to the questions in the field of cognitive science, and about recent research that suggests new answers. Lakoff calls the traditional view objectivism, according to which a collection of symbols placed in correspondence with an objectively structured world is viewed as a representation of reality. Lakoff refers to the new view as experiential realism or alternatively as experientialism, which reflects the idea that thought fundamentally grows out of embodiment. Experientialism is thus defined in contrast with objectivism, which holds that the characteristics of the organism have nothing essential to do with concepts or with the nature of reason.
This book covers all aspects of the relationship between language and mind, as well as applications and extensions of cognitive linguistics to the study of text, literature, discourse, and society. Part One provides an introduction to Generalization and Cognitive Commitments. Part Two turns to the cognitive linguistics approach to conceptual structure which subserves both language and thought. Part Three considers the nature of semantic structure. Part Four addresses form, and its relationship with meaning. Part Five addresses the way in which the cognitive linguistics enterprise has been applied and extended to the nature of language and behavior in a range of other domains and functions.
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