Introducing Cognitive Linguistics Oxford Handbooks

Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
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date: 06 June 2022
in corpora) may be determined simultaneously by grammatical, discursive, and sociolin­
guistic factors. Disentangling those different factors, then, becomes one methodological 
endeavor: in the actual practice of a usage-based enquiry, grammatical analysis and varia­
tionist analysis will go hand in hand.
For another, there is an interest in cultural models and the way in which they may com­
pete within a community: see, for instance, many of the papers collected in Dirven, Frank, 
and Pütz (2003). In work such as Lakoff (1996), this approach takes on a critical aspect 
that brings it close to the tradition of ideological analysis known as Critical Discourse 
Analysis. Some researchers are applying the theory of conceptual metaphors and cultural 
models to questions of social identity and the role language plays in them: see the collec­
tive volumes edited by Dirven, Frank, and Ilie (2001), Dirven, Frank, and Putz (2003), and 
Dirven, Hawkins, and Sandikcioglu (2001). It has recently been pointed out (Berthele
2001; Geeraerts
2003) that such metaphorical models may also characterize the beliefs 
that language users entertain regarding language and language varieties. In this way, 
Cognitive Linguistics may link up with existing sociolinguistic research about language 
attitudes.
These developments show that the interest in sociovariational analysis in Cognitive Lin­
guistics is on the rise, but at the same time, it has to be recognized that the final contex­
tual gap that we discussed in the previous section still has to be filled properly.
2. If we understand
empirical methods
to refer to forms of research (like corpus linguis­
tics, experimentation, and neurological modeling) that do not rely on introspection and in­
tuition but that try to ground linguistic analysis on the firm basis of objective observation, 
then we can certainly witness a growing appeal of such empirical methods within Cogni­
tive Linguistics: see the argumentation of Gibbs (2006) and Geeraerts (2006b) in favor of 
empirical methods, and compare the practical introduction provided by Gonzalez-Mar­
quez, Mittelberg, Coulson, and Spivey (2007
). The theoretical background of this develop­
ment is provided by the growing tendency of Cognitive Linguistics to stress its essential 
nature as a usage-based linguistics—a form of linguistic analysis, that is, that takes into 
account not just grammatical structure, but that sees this structure as arising from and 
interacting with actual language use. The central notions of usage-based linguistics have 
been programmatically outlined in different publications (Langacker
 
1990; Kemmer and 
Barlow
2000; Tomasello
 
2000,
 
2003; Bybee and Hopper
2001b; Croft and Cruse
 
2004), 
and a number of recent volumes show how the program can be put into practice (Barlow 
and Kemmer
 
2000; Bybee and Hopper
2001a; Verhagen and van de Weijer
2003). The link 
between the self-awareness of Cognitive Linguistics as a usage-based form of linguistic 
investigation and the deployment of empirical methods is straightforward: you cannot 
have a usage-based linguistics unless you study actual usage—as it appears in corpora in 
the form of spontaneous, nonelicited language data or as it appears in an online and 
elicited form in experimental settings.
Also, if Cognitive Linguistics belongs to cognitive science, it would be natural to expect 
the use of techniques that have proved their value in the cognitive sciences at large. Ex­

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