Филологические науки/3.Теоретические и методологические
проблемы исследования языка
Rak
O.M.
Department
of Foreign Languages
Bukovinian
State Medical University, Chernivtsi, Ukraine
LINGUISTICS AS A COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Cognitive
linguistics is the study of the mind through language and the study of language
as a cognitive function. Cognitive linguistics has two main goals: 1) to
study how cognitive mechanisms (memory, categorization, attention, and imagery)
are used during language behavior; and 2) to develop psychologically
viable models of language that cover broad ranges of linguistic phenomena,
including idioms and figurative language. Research in cognitive linguistics is
multi-disciplinary; evidence is drawn from text analysis, language acquisition,
language change, psycholinguistic experimentation, and brain imaging, among
other sources.
The
most influential linguists working upon these fields of study and focusing
centrally on cognitive principles and organization were Wallace Chafe, Charles
Fillmore, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Leonard Talmy, Eleanor Rosch, William Croft, D. Alan Cruse, Sydney M. Lamb, Paul Allen Miller; among the
domestic linguists-scientists Yu. Stepanov, R. Frumkina,
I. Melchuk, V. Zhaivoronok, N. Arutiunova, V. Karasyk,
V. Zusman, S. Askoldov, S. Liapin, H. Slyshkin,
V. Manakin, I. Holubovska, V. Maslova should be noted; they
suppose that the main task of cognitive linguistics is to find out and explain
how the knowledge about world is organized in human consciousness, how the
notions about world are created and fixed.
The purpose
of this paper is to provide a general orientation in cognitive linguistics, an
understanding of its central themes and assumptions, and exposure to its
empirical methods. It is also important to trace some major commitments that
make cognitive linguistics a distinct and worthwhile enterprise. The areas of
research and theory construction which characterize cognitive linguistics and
make it one of the most lively, exciting and promising schools of thought and
practice in modern cognitive science have to be briefly surveyed too.
Cognitive
science meets the parameters of research of interdisciplinary nature, so the
study of cognitive linguistics implies the fulfillment of such objectives:
1) review and analyze major trends and prospects of development of this
branch in modern linguistics; 2) confirm anthropocentric nature of
cognitive linguistics; 3) describe its main principles;
4) characterize basic processes stimulated / regulated by cognitive
linguistics.
The
label "Cognitive Linguistics" has been given to an approach to the
study of language that began in the 1970s and has become more and more fruitful
since the 1980s. Most of the research has focused on semantics, but morphology
and syntax also figure significantly, plus other linguistic areas like language
acquisition, phonology, and historical linguistics. As W. Croft and
D. Cruse [1] together with Wellesley College researchers [2] state there
are three major hypotheses which guide the cognitive approach to language:
§
language is not an autonomous cognitive faculty, but depends on and is
embedded in our general cognitive faculties;
§
grammar is conceptualization, i.e. linguistic structures are closely
connected to our non-linguistic concepts of the world; for instance, syntactic
functions like subject and objects mirror the participants in an event that we
witness.
§
knowledge of language emerges from language use; in effect, this means
that we are not genetically equipped with an abstract and universal grammar
which only needs input from the language which we are exposed to as children,
but that the language acquisition process is closely connected to pairings of
non-linguistic situations with linguistic expressions which we encounter at an
early age.
Establishment
and development of cognitive linguistics was stipulated by a dynamic
interdisciplinary investigation of the nature and origins of thought and
language. Cognitive scientists seek answers to fundamental questions about the
mental processes: How is it that we can learn and remember? Sense the world
around us? What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? How has
evolution shaped the mind? Could a computer think? Linguistics is the study of
questions relating the structure, history, philosophy, psychology, and use of
language: What are the properties of languages and how are they acquired? How
did language evolve and how have languages changed over time? How is language
organized in the brain? [3]
Answers
to these questions are found by using techniques and expertise from a number of
different disciplines including psychology, linguistics, computer science,
philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience. Despite differences in methods of
investigation, cognitive scientists have a commitment to a set of ideas: that
the mind is a function of the brain, that thinking is a kind of computation,
that language and cognition can best be understood as a set of specialized
processes and representations. More recently, greater attention has been given
to the impact of evolution on thought and language [3].
Cognitive
linguistics sees language as embedded in the overall cognitive capacities of
man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the
structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as
prototypicality, systematic polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery, and
metaphor); the functional principles of linguistic organization (such as
iconicity and naturalness); the conceptual interface between syntax and
semantics (as explored by cognitive grammar and construction grammar); the
experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-use; and the relationship
between language and thought, including questions about relativism and
conceptual universals. Crucially there is no single, uniform doctrine according to which these research topics are
pursued by cognitive linguistics. In this sense, cognitive linguistics is a
flexible framework rather than a single theory of language. In terms of
category structure (one of the standard topics for analysis in cognitive
linguistics), as D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens [4] believe that
cognitive linguistics may be considered as a category, having a family
resemblance structure: it constitutes a cluster of many partially overlapping
approaches rather than a single well-defined theory.
Developing
the question of main principles we can not ignore an issue “New Directions in
Cognitive Linguistics” [5], in which the authors single out four principles of
cognitive linguistics: “Perhaps the most fundamental distinguishing
characteristic of cognitive linguistics as a research paradigm is the
hypothesis that grammatical structures and processes in the mind are instances
of general cognitive abilities. In other words language is not an autonomous
cognitive faculty. A second principle which has guided much work in this field
of science is that grammar is symbolic and thus meaning is an essential part of
grammar. The third and forth principles focus on meaning and differentiate
cognitive semantics from formal, logic-based, truth-conditional semantics. It
denotes that meaning is encyclopedic. Everything we know about the real world
experience denoted by the word or construction plays a role in its meaning.
Memory is involved in the organization of knowledge and the production of
utterances. Categorization is involved in all of the above, since it plays a
central and pervasive role in human cognition. All of these are essential for
understanding the nature of language” [5].
Cognitive
linguistics undoubtedly became a new vector in modern science. It enabled the
researchers to investigate the connection of language with thinking and to
prove that lexical unit names, expresses, reflects and accumulates the acquired
experience or knowledge. Most scientists agree: the main principle of cognitive
linguistics is that meaning is an essential part of language, its primary
focus; one of the most important human cognitive skills is the capability to
generalize or, in other words, to schematize. In cognitive linguistics this ability
results in two interconnected processes – categorization and conceptualization
which are opposite to each other, i.e. represent objective reality from larger
structures to smaller ones and vice versa. They schematize the world reflecting
its universal arranged structure.
References:
1. Croft W. Cognitive
Linguistics // William Croft, D. Alan Cruse. – Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004. – 356 p.
2. Cognitive Linguistics : http://www.iaawiki.tu-dortmund.de/index.php?title=Cognitive_Linguistics
3. Cognitive and Linguistic
Sciences is the Study of How the Mind Works : http://www.wellesley.edu/cogsci
4. Geeraerts D. Introducing
Cognitive Linguistics. The Oxford Handbook
of Cognitive Linguistics / Dirk Geeraerts, Hubert
Cuyckens. – Oxford University Press, 2010.
5. New Directions in Cognitive
Linguistics / ed. by Vyvyan Evans, Stéphaie Pourcel: John Benjamins PC.
– Philadelphia, 2009. – 520 p.