Introducing Cognitive Linguistics Oxford Handbooks

Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
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date: 06 June 2022
er approaches may develop each of these tendencies separately in more detail than Cog­
nitive Linguistics does, but it is the latter movement that combines them most explicitly 
and so epitomizes the characteristic underlying drift and drive of present-day linguistics. 
We would like to suggest, in short, that it is this feature that constitutes one of the funda­
mental reasons behind the success of Cognitive Linguistics.
6.
The Future of Cognitive Linguistics
The recognition that Cognitive Linguistics is not a closed or finished doctrine implies, ob­
viously, that there is room for further developments. The contributions brought together 
in this
Handbook
not only give an idea of the achievements of Cognitive Linguistics, but 
they also point to a number of underlying issues that are likely to shape the further elabo­
ration of Cognitive Linguistics. Three issues that we would like to highlight are the follow­
ing.
1. Readers will have noticed that a fourth type of context mentioned in our description of 
the decontextualizing tendencies of twentieth-century linguistics was absent from our 
overview of recontextualizing tendencies that apply to Cognitive Linguistics. In fact, Cog­
nitive Linguistics, by its very “cognitive” nature, has a tendency to look at language from 
a psychological point of view, that is, language as (part of) the organization of knowledge 
in the individual mind. However, a number of researchers (Palmer
 
1996; Sinha and Jensen 
de López
 
2000; Harder
 
2003; Itkonen
2003; Tomasello
 
2003, and others) emphasize that 
the experientialist nature of Cognitive Linguistics does not only refer to material factors 
(taking a notion like “embodiment” in a physical and physiological sense) but that the cul­
tural environment and the socially interactive nature of language should be recognized as 
primary elements of a cognitive approach.
This emphasis on the
social aspects of language
, however, will have to be turned into a an 
actual research program exploring social cognition and sociovariational
(p. 16)
phenome­
na. If Cognitive Linguistics develops an interest in language as a social phenomenon, it 
should pay more attention to language-internal variation. Socio-linguistic research, how­
ever, is probably the least developed of all linguistic domains within Cognitive Linguistics. 
Recently, though, we witness some developments toward cognitive sociolinguistics.
For one thing, variational phenomena are being studied empirically in work such as Kris­
tiansen (2003) on phonetic variation, Berthele (2004
) on differences in syntactic constru­
al between dialects, and Grondelaers (2000) on grammatical phenomena whose distribu­
tion is determined by a combination of internal (structural or semantic) and external (con­
textual or sociolinguistic) factors. More examples may be found in Kristiansen and Dirven 
(2007
). Usage-based and meaning-based models of grammar in fact introduce more varia­
tion into the grammar than a rule-based approach tends to do: the language-internal or 
discourse-related factors that influence the use of a particular construction may be mani­
fold, and the presence or absence of a construction is not an all-or-none matter. In the 
analysis of this type of variation, it often appears that the variation is codetermined by 
“external” sociolinguistic factors: the variation that appears in actual usage (as attested 

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