Introducing Cognitive Linguistics Oxford Handbooks

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Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
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date: 06 June 2022
Print Publication Date:
Jun 2010 Subject:
Linguistics, Morphology and Syntax
Online Publication Date:
Sep 2012 DOI:
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199738632.013.0001
Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
and
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
Edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens
 
Abstract and Keywords
Cognitive linguistics as represented in this book is an approach to the analysis of natural 
language that originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the work of George Lakoff, 
Ron Langacker, and Len Talmy, and that focuses on language as an instrument for orga­
nizing, processing, and conveying information. This introductory article sketches the the­
oretical position of cognitive linguistics together with a number of practical features of 
the way in which research in cognitive linguistics is organized. Three fundamental char­
acteristics of cognitive linguistics can be derived: the primacy of semantics in linguistic 
analysis, the encyclopedic nature of linguistic meaning, and the perspectival nature of lin­
guistic meaning. This article also discusses how cognitive linguistics and generative 
grammar can both proclaim themselves to be cognitive enterprises. The book deals with 
different conceptual phenomena that are recognized by cognitive linguistics as key con­
cepts: prototypicality, metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, perspectivization, mental 
spaces, and the like. Each constitutes a specific principle of conceptual organization as 
reflected in the language.
Keywords:
 
Ron Langacker,
cognitive linguistics,
 
natural language,
 
semantics,
linguistic meaning,
 
generative gram­
mar,
 
metaphor,
 
metonymy,
 
mental spaces,
 
perspectivization