What’s Cognitive Linguistics? A new framework for the study of Basque

Ibarretxe Antuñano, Iraide (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: What is cognitive linguistics? A new framework for the study of Basque Iraide Ibarretxe Antuñano Introduction: More than one Cognitive Linguistics? Cognitive Linguistics is a new approach to the study of language which views linguistic knowledge as part of general cognition and thinking; linguistic behaviour is not separated from other general cognitive abilities which allow mental processes of reasoning, memory, attention or learning, but understood as an integral part of it. It emerged in the late seventies and early eighties, especially through the work of George Lakoff, one of the founders of Generative Semantics, and Ronald Langacker, also an ex-practitioner of Generative Linguistics. As a consequence, this new paradigm could be seen as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language (see Ruiz de Mendoza, 1997). Some of the main assumptions underlying the generative approaches to syntax and semantics are not in accordance with the experimental data in linguistics, psychology and other fields; the „generative commitment‟ to notational formalism, that is to say the use of „formal grammars‟ which view languages as systems of arbitrary symbols manipulated by mathematical rules of the sort first characterised by Emil Post, is employed at the expense of descriptive adequacy and psychological realism (see Lakoff, 1987). What Lakoff (1990: 43) refers to as „non-finitary phenomena‟, i.e. mental images, general cognitive processes, basiclevel categories, prototype phenomena, the use of neural foundations for linguistic theory and so on, are not considered part of these grammars because they are not characterisable in this notation. It is from this dissatisfaction with the dominant model that Cognitive Linguistics was created. Although Cognitive Linguistics as a general framework emerged in the late seventies, it is important to bear in mind two points. Firstly, some of the cognitive assumptions central to this approach are not new. Authors such as Geeraerts (1988), Jäkel (1999), Nerlich and Clarke (2001a, b, 2002) and Taylor (1995) have shown that many of the ideas that I will

Idioma: Inglés

Año: 2004

Publicado en: Cahiers AFLS (Online) 10, 2 (2004), 3-31
ISSN: 1756-4476

Tipo y forma: Artículo (Versión definitiva)

Área (Departamento): Área Lingüística General (Dpto. Lingüíst. Gral. e Hisp.)