Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction to Key Concepts

[00:00:01]hello there and welcome to this course in cognitive Linguistics the fact that you're watching this video tells me that you probably know what Linguistics is and you probably also have already some kind of idea of what cognitive Linguistics might be nonetheless let me explain a bit what this course will be about so um as you expect it's an introduction to cognitive Linguistics and I will present cognitive linguistics as the study of language in terms of General cognitive processes such as categorization schematization or analogy now these are called domain General cognitive processes because they're not restricted to language we don't just use them in language processing or language production but rather they're also at work in other cognitive tasks that you do as a human being right so in this course these videos you'll find out about the assumptions and goals of cognitive Linguistics I will try to cover its main research themes and I'll also say a few things about how the field has developed since its Inception in the early 80s now um here are some of the topics that I will discuss metapher of course looms large in cognitive Linguistics categorization prototypes that's another important topic polysemy words with multiple mean meanings um we'll talk about that conceptual blending the conceptual integration of very different ideas frame semantics how how words get their meanings from the frames the situations in which they are used usage based models of language the idea that experience with language shapes your knowledge of language cognitive grammar um a cognitive approach to grammar that tries to reduce it to basic cognitive processes and principles and construction grammar which you might know is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart okay so these are some of the things that I'll try to cover um what will be going on in this video in this video I'll ask the question what is cognitive Linguistics uh don't expect the full tour of the territory right um so I'm just going to ask few questions and thereby try to explain um what this Beast uh cognitive Linguistics really is so here um I have four little clouds that are meant to symbolize thoughts that perhaps are on your mind right now so some of you might be thinking well cognitive Linguistics it has this word cognitive in it is it perhaps a branch of psycholinguistics H um other people might think well cognitive Linguistics is associated with uh types of linguistics that that call themselves functional yeah it's concerned with the communicative functions of language and there are formal approaches and functional approaches and cognitive Linguistics is more of a functional approach um still others um you know if you've come across some cognitive linguistic work you probably have come across work on metaphors and so I couldn't blame you for thinking that cognitive Linguistics is sort of the Linguistics of metaphors but of course it's much more than that we'll cover that so um you see the fourth little Cloud there um asking is cognitive Linguistics anti- chomskian is it well let's explore this a bit um now if you listen to cognitive linguists uh you might get the idea that cognitive Linguistics is so anti-skin it's the definition of antich skin yeah but if you look a bit deeper it actually emerges that there are quite a number of shared assumptions yeah things that generative linguists and cognitive linguists basically agree on yeah for instance they agree that the knowledge of language that a speaker has is the primary object of investigation that is what we want to find out we want to know what does a speaker know when they know a language and uh we want to build a working model of that knowledge and a key aim uh of linguistics does has been um to explain why some sentences are grammatical and others are not grammatical yeah I've given a little pair of examples here in the mirror John saw himself that's a good sentence of English English you can you can ask any native speaker you like and they'll tell you yeah that's a normal ordinary sentence of English and um then you can ask them okay in the mirror himself saw John is that also a sentence of English and they'll say no that is word soup yeah not a grammatical sentence of English and as a syntacticians you're beginning to wonder well why is that yeah this is not just a coincidence there must be an explanation for that and uh so this is how syntactic theories come about right um why this obsession with grammatical and ungrammatical sentences well if you want to build a working model of linguistic knowledge then this model should generate all the good sentences of English and it should not allow you to form all the bad sentences of English if you arrive at that goal you actually have a formalized working model of what linguistic knowledge must be like and this has been the main goal for generative Linguistics since what uh 1957 okay and cognitive linguists have basically the same goal they want to find out what people know when they know a language so shared assumptions between the chowski and the Not So chump skins now of course there are also rejections of Fairly fundamental generative assumptions for instance uh this idea that there's a universal grammar or a language acquisition device in the brain language Instinct that is rejected yeah uh cognitive linguists believe that there you know you can do without that you can just learn language with uh the help of domain General cognitive processes also cognitive linguists uh view very critically this idea that linguistic knowledge is organized in a modular fashion yeah I call this here the grammar and dictionary view of linguistic knowledge so that one module in your brain handles the grammar and syntax all the rules basically and then there's another component that has all the words and idioms and exceptions yeah the cognitive linguistic view is that of an integrated holistic uh repository of linguistic units the third point on this slide is that uh well uh in the cognitive worldview knowledge of language emerges from language use that's anathema to generativist yeah so um frequency in the generative Paradigm does not play a huge role frequency is fundamental in the cognitive uh world view so um in more positive terms what is cognitive Linguistics as opposed to um Tran generative Linguistics well cognitive linguists attempt to describe what speakers know when they know a language so that's a point of convergence um they try to describe all the constructions all the words all the idioms um and they attempt to relate that knowledge to General cognitive processes such as categorization scheme of formation analogy and so on and so forth so the idea is no there is no language specific wiring in your brain rather language learning works you can get it off the ground just with General cognitive processes and then cognitive Linguistics also attempts to explain how your knowledge of language comes comes into being through language use that is experience with language right I want to move on to a contrast of psycholinguistics and cognitive Linguistics on the surface it may seem that well you know these two seem very much compatible um but there are some differences so psycholinguistics I'm not telling you anything new here you probably know that is um interested in uh the question how does the human mind handle language so uh language processing language production language acquisition those are three areas of psycholinguistic Investigation um unlike cognitive Linguistics psychol Linguistics is not tied to a single theory of language it's rather you know a subject matter that unites um the different people doing psycho Linguistics um and also a certain methodology you psycholinguists so psychol Linguistics has a much longer empirical tradition than cognitive linguistic yeah so coming from psychology where uh people have been working empirically for a long long time the focus in psycholinguistics is on so-called online data that doesn't mean internet data that doesn't mean um behavioral data that that actual people produce yeah so reaction times in response to some kind of stimulus eye movements if you give them a screen with figures to look at brain Imaging these kinds of things okay that is the bread and butter of the working psycholinguist and well how does cognitive Linguistics stack up against this um cognitive linguists are not so much concerned with processing which you might find funny yeah but that's how it is um but cognitive linguists are very much concerned with the question what does language the structures and forms of language what do they tell us about the human mind what can we infer about cognition looking at language so cognitive linguists are very much concerned with language structures including the forms but also the meanings of language and language representation how it must be represented in the mind yeah unlike psycholinguist cognitive Linguistics is conceived of as a theory of language a theory of how language Works a theory of the knowledge that speakers have in their minds again there are points of convergence psycholinguistics is also concerned with the construction of cognitive models um but no psycholinguist um would attempt to build you know the super model that explains it all whereas cognitive linguists are a bit more bold in that regard so they you know go for it we explain everything okay and um cognitive linguists have for the longest time been using offline data so linguistic examples like the in the M himself saw John grammaticality judgments and um Corpus data to be sure there's a trend towards experimental methods towards more sophisticated Corpus studies but that's where it comes from okay from a very philological um language theoretical perspective right um in terms of methodology uh psycholinguistics is very much a divide and conquer approach so they're trying to Define an object of study and um try to investigate it in very fine detail things like word recognition or syntactic parsing or a sentence comprehension or anfer resolution the way that you link a pronoun to the noun phrase that it actually refers to yeah so these are relatively small areas of investigation and so um psyc linguists who are concerned with these they would develop models that mimic human behavior with regard to these tasks as closely as possible by contrast cognitive Linguistics is very much a theory of everything yeah how language is represented in the mind how it is learned and used how it changes the universe and all the rest yeah okay uh I'm doing neither of the approaches Justice really but uh as a caricature uh this will do moving on um is cognitive Linguistics functional is it concerned with the functions of language yes it is so in functional Linguistics a basic assumption is that language is the way it is because it is used for communication yeah so it is a tool for getting things done in the world and um so that means that the structures and forms of language that that you see are the way they are because of the way they are used so form follows function and this clashes with formal approaches which hold that the structures of language are determined by formal principles that are independent of functional pressures okay let me first give you an example of where you see functional pressure in language have you ever wondered why the words that you use the most pronouns articles things like that prepositions maybe uh are so short yeah words that you use often tend to be very short words that you use less often they can be longer now from a functional point of view this makes total sense yeah uh because the things that you use often they need to be quick and handy and uh you need to be uh basically using them very fast and so so well there you have it um language is efficient because well it's usage based it's functional uh it is used for communication however um let me read these two examples here um which are an argument that a formalist would raise okay you functionalists explain me this um here have one sentence of English that's a grammatical sentence this is the report that I filed before reading um so report is a noun and then you have a relative Clause that I filed uh before reading and it is understood that what you read is the report um okay this relative Clause construction works great but um if you try to do the same thing in the main Clause I filed the report before reading native speakers of English will tell you um that's not a sentence of English sorry to tell you that's ungrammatical and you wonder well but it works in the relative Clause construction and it's perfectly understandable what I wanted to say and why is this not a grammatical sentence of English and they will say I don't know it just is that way and the formalists will say see that's because language structure has nothing to do with function it has all and everything to do with form okay I don't know how much you make of examples like these they're certainly embarrassing if you're a diend the wool functionalist like I am for instance um and um well cognitive linguists ought to find some explanation that would um well convincingly show why it is crystal clear that I filed the report before reading must be ungrammatical okay um moving on to the fourth cloud is cognitive Linguistics about metaphors a resounding yes cognitive Linguistics is very well known for work on meaning in general and work on metaphor in particular and um what's a definition of metaphor in the cognitive framework well uh The crucial thing that cognitive Linguistics does differently than say other approaches to Metaphor there are gazillion approaches to metaphors um so the cognitive approach uh holds that the essence of metaphor is understanding one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing so metaphor is not just a matter of words not just a matter of language it's a cognitive thing it's a a way of seeing the world of understanding complex things in terms of more simple things that we can relate to let me give you an example uh here are classic examples uh that you will find a lot uh she attacked every weak point in my argument your claims are indefensible you're going to get a lot of flack for those suggestions or they had to surrender to the force of our arguments if you look at the underlined words here uh you notice that people are talking about sort of having um an argument discussing with each other but the words they're using for that are semantically from a different field they're from the field of fighting a war so being in an argument having a heated discussion is talked about in terms of armed conflict fighting a war and so the idea is well if we talk about these things in terms of War could it be that we are actually thinking about these things in terms of War yeah do we think that an argument is kind of like fighting war that is the central point of conceptual metapher Theory and to give you the uh briefest summary ever of cogn conceptual metaphor Theory you have two domains The Source domain that provides the vocabulary and the target domain which is the thing that you're talking about the thing that you're trying to understand and uh uh between the two domains between the source domain and the target domain there are mappings so that uh the participants in an argument in the Target domain um receive a mapping from the fighting parties in the domain of War so we understand the arguing participants as the fighting parties in a war we understand um raising objections in the Target domain in terms of attacking in a war maintaining your opinion is understood in terms of Defending and giving up your opinion is understood in terms of surrendering to the enemy okay I'll say more about metaphors uh in the next episode so more about metapher coming up right these were the four questions that I wanted to raise um is cognitive Linguistics like psycho Linguistics is it like functional Linguistics is it about metaphors is it anti- charmian and I hope you have got um rough idea of what will happen in the next videos so I'll see you next time