Introducing Cognitive Linguistics Oxford Handbooks

Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
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date: 06 June 2022
perimental psychology, for instance, has a long tradition of empirical studies of cognition. 
So, one might count on the use of the same methods in Cognitive Linguistics. And obvi­
ously, the growing interest in the link between Cognitive Linguistics and neuroscience 
(headed by the Neural Theory of Language Group of George Lakoff and Jerome Feldman) 
goes in the same direction.
The recent rise of interest in empirical methods does not imply, to be sure, that empirical 
approaches were absent in the earlier stages of Cognitive Linguistics. The methodology of 
European studies in Cognitive Linguistics in particular has tended to be more corpus-
based than the early American studies, which were predominantly introspective. The use 
of corpus materials (which seems to have come to the attention of the broader community 
of Cognitive Linguistics only since Kemmer and Barlow
 
2000) was already part of early 
European studies like Dirven and Taylor (1988), Rudzka-Ostyn (1988), Schulze (1988), 
Goossens (1990), and Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema (1994). Early experimental 
studies, on the other hand, are represented by the work of Gibbs (1994, and many more) 
and Sandra and Rice (1995
). In this respect, what is changing is not so much the pres­
ence of empirical research as such, but rather the extent to which the belief in such a 
methodology is shared by cognitive linguists at large.
However, the empirical aspects of usage-based linguistics still often remain programmat­
ic: in many cases, a lot more methodological sophistication will have to be brought in 
than is currently available. In the realm of corpus research, for instance, the type of quan­
titatively well-founded investigations that may be found in the work of Gries (2003
), Ste­
fanowitsch (2003), Gries and Stefanowitsch (2006), and Stefanowitsch and Gries (2003) 
and in that of Grondelaers, Speelman, and Geeraerts (2002), and Speelman, Grondelaers, 
and Geeraerts (2003) is still rather exceptional. (For an overview of the methodological 
state of affairs in usage-based linguistics, see Tummers, Heylen, and Geeraerts
 
2005.)
(p. 18)
More generally, the rising interest in empirical methods is far from being a domi­
nant tendency, and overall, there is a certain reluctance with regard to the adoption of an 
empirical methodology. While the reasons for this relative lack of enthusiasm may to 
some extent be practical (training in experimental techniques or corpus research is not a 
standard part of curricula in linguistics), one cannot exclude the possibility of a more 
principled rejection. Cognitive Linguistics considers itself to be a nonobjectivist theory of 
language, whereas the use of corpus materials involves an attempt to maximalize the ob­
jective basis of linguistic descriptions. Is an objectivist methodology compatible with a 
nonobjectivist theory? Isn't any attempt to reduce the role of introspection and intuition 
in linguistic research contrary to the spirit of Cognitive Linguistics, which stresses the se­
mantic aspects of the language—and the meaning of linguistic expressions is the least 
tangible of linguistic phenomena. Because meanings do not present themselves directly in 
the corpus data, will introspection not always be used in any cognitive analysis of lan­
guage? (For an explicit defense of such a position, albeit in terms of “intuition” rather 
than “introspection,” see Itkonen
2003.)

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