Introducing Cognitive Linguistics Oxford Handbooks

Introducing Cognitive Linguistics
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date: 06 June 2022
Given this initial characterization of the cognitive nature of Cognitive Linguistics, we can 
now turn to the second question: how can it be that Cognitive Linguistics and Generative 
Grammar both proclaim themselves to be cognitive enterprises?
Essentially, the two approaches differ with regard to the epistemological role of natural 
language. They both agree (and this is their common cognitive parentage) that there can 
be no knowledge without the existence of a mental representation
(p. 6)
that has a consti­
tutive, mediating role in the epistemological relationship between subject and object. But 
while, according to Cognitive Linguistics, natural languages precisely embody such cate­
gorial perspectives onto the outside world, the generative linguist takes natural language 
as the object of the epistemological relationship, rather than as the intermediate link be­
tween subject and object. Cognitive Linguistics is interested in our knowledge of the 
world and studies the question how natural language contributes to it. The generative lin­
guist, conversely, is interested in our knowledge of the language and asks the question 
how such knowledge can be acquired given a cognitive theory of learning. As cognitive 
enterprises, Cognitive Linguistics and Generative Grammar are similarly interested in 
those mental structures that are constitutive of knowledge. For the Cognitive approach, 
natural language itself consists of such structures, and the relevant kind of knowledge is 
knowledge of the world. For the generative grammarian, however, the knowledge under 
consideration is knowledge of the language, and the relevant mental structures are con­
stituted by the genetic endowment of human beings that enables them to learn the lan­
guage. Whereas Generative Grammar is interested in knowledge
of
the language, Cogni­
tive Linguistics is so to speak interested in knowledge
through
the language.
The characterization that we just gave of the “cognitive” nature of Cognitive Linguistics 
in comparison with the cognitive nature of Generative Grammar suggests that there are 
two ways in which a direct confrontation of Cognitive Linguistics and Generative Gram­
mar can be achieved.
In the first place, taking into account the formalist stance of Generative Grammar, Cogni­
tive Linguistics should try to show that an adequate description of the allegedly formal 
phenomena at the core of generative theory formation involve semantic and functional 
factors that are beyond the self-imposed limits of the generative framework. In this sense, 
Cognitive Linguistics is characterized by a specific working hypothesis about natural lan­
guage, namely, that much more in natural language can be explained on semantic and 
functional grounds than has hitherto been assumed (a working hypothesis that it shares, 
to be sure, with many other pragmatically and functionally oriented linguistic theories). 
Any time a particular phenomenon turns out to involve cognitive functioning rather than 
just formal syntax, the need to posit genetically given formal constraints on possible syn­
tactic constructions diminishes. A prime example of this type of argumentation can be 
found in van Hoek's chapter
 
34
of this
Handbook
.
In the second place, Cognitive Linguistics should develop a nonautonomist theory of lan­
guage acquisition embodying the predictions, first, that language acquisition often in­
volves mechanisms and constraints that are not specific to natural language, and second, 

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