Introducing Cognitive Linguistics Oxford Handbooks

Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
Page
5
of
21
PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com).
©
Oxford University Press, 2022. All Rights 
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in 
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see
 
Privacy Policy
 
and
Legal Notice).
date: 06 June 2022
to the extent that there do exist constraints on learning that are restricted to natural lan­
guage acquisition, that these will at least to some extent draw on “informational sub­
stance” supplied by cognitive systems other than the linguistic. In chapter
41
 
of the 
present
Handbook
, Tomasello illustrates how this program is actually carried out.
(p. 7)
To summarize, what holds together the diverse forms of Cognitive Linguistics is the 
belief that linguistic knowledge involves not just knowledge of the language, but knowl­
edge of the world as mediated by the language. Because of this shift in the type of knowl­
edge that the approaches focus on in contrast with Generative Grammar, and specifically 
because of the experientialist nature of Cognitive Linguistics, it is sometimes said that 
Cognitive Linguistics belongs to the “second cognitive revolution,” whereas Generative 
Grammar belongs to the “first cognitive revolution” of the 1950s; see Sinha, this volume, 
chapter
49, for an elaboration.
3.
The Practical Aspects of Cognitive Linguis­
tics
Scientific frameworks are not just sets of concepts, models, and techniques: they also 
consist of people, activities, and channels of communication. Thinking in terms of people, 
the key figures of Cognitive Linguistics are George Lakoff, Ronald W. Langacker, and 
Leonard Talmy. Around this core of founding fathers, who originated Cognitive Linguistics 
in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, two chronologically widening circles of cognitive 
linguists may be discerned. A first wave, coming to the fore in the second half of the 
1980s, consists of the early collaborators and colleagues of the key figures, together with 
a first generation of students. Names that come to mind include those of Gilles Faucon­
nier, Eve Sweetser, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Ray Gibbs, Bill Croft, Adele Goldberg, 
Dave Tuggy, Laura Janda, Suzanne Kemmer, Sally Rice, Ricardo Maldonado, and Karen 
van Hoek. Simultaneously, a number of people in mostly Western and Central Europe took 
up the ideas of Cognitive Linguistics and contributed to their international dissemination. 
Names include those of René; Dirven, Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, John Taylor, Chris Sinha, 
Arie Verhagen, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Peter Harder, Günter Radden, and the 
editors of this
Handbook
. The 1990s witnessed a second wave of expansion, directed 
largely toward Asia and the south of Europe.
Organizationally, the contacts between the people working in the Cognitive Linguistics 
framework are facilitated by the ICLA or International Cognitive Linguistics Association. 
The Association (see
 
http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/), which has a number of local 
and regional affiliates, organizes the biannual conferences in Cognitive Linguistics that 
constitute the rallying point for people working in the field. The first ICLC conference 
was organized in 1989 in Duisburg by René Dirven (whose role in giving Cognitive Lin­
guistics an organizational structure can hardly be underestimated). Later venues include 
Santa Cruz (1991), Leuven (1993), Albuquerque (1995), Amsterdam (1997), Stockholm 

---