Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science,

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...

neuropsychology Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology concerned with how a person's cognition and behavior are related to the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Professionals in this branch of psychology often focus on how injuries or illnesses of t ...

and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand

cognition Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, though ...

in general and is seen as a road into the human mind. There has been scientific and terminological controversy around the label "cognitive linguistics"; there is no consensus on what specifically is meant with the term.

Background

The roots of cognitive linguistics are in

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

’s 1959 critical review of

B. F. Skinner Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. C ...

’s '' Verbal Behavior''. Chomsky's rejection of behavioural psychology and his subsequent anti-behaviourist activity helped bring about a shift of focus from

empiricism In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological theory that holds that knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views within epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empir ...

mentalism Mentalism is a performing art in which its practitioners, known as mentalists, appear to demonstrate highly developed mental or intuitive abilities. Performances may appear to include hypnosis, telepathy, clairvoyance, divination, precognitio ...

in psychology under the new concepts of

and cognitive science. Chomsky considered linguistics as a subfield of cognitive science in the 1970s but called his model transformational or

generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...

. Having been engaged with Chomsky in the

linguistic wars The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American theoretical linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between Noam Chomsky and some of his early colleagues and do ...

George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The con ...

united in the early 1980s with

Ronald Langacker Ronald Wayne Langacker (born December 27, 1942) is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of cognitive g ...

and other advocates of neo-Darwinian linguistics in a so-called ”Lakoff–Langacker agreement”. It is suggested that they picked the name ”cognitive linguistics” for their new framework to undermine the reputation of generative grammar as a cognitive science. Consequently, there are three competing approaches that today consider themselves as true representatives of cognitive linguistics. One is the Lakoffian–Langackerian brand with capitalised initials ( Cognitive Linguistics). The second is generative grammar, while the third approach is proposed by scholars whose work falls outside the scope of the other two. They argue that cognitive linguistics should not be taken as the name of a specific selective framework, but as a whole field of scientific research that is assessed by its evidential rather than theoretical value.

Approaches

Generative Grammar

Generative grammar functions as a source of hypotheses about language computation in the mind and brain. It is argued to be the study of 'the cognitive neuroscience of language'. Generative grammar studies behavioural instincts and the biological nature of cognitive-linguistic algorithms, providing a computational–representational theory of mind. This in practice means that sentence analysis by linguists is taken as a way to uncover cognitive structures. It is argued that a random genetic mutation in humans has caused syntactic structures to appear in the mind. Therefore, the fact that people have language does not rely on its communicative purposes. For a famous example, it was argued by linguist

that sentences of the type "''Is the man who is hungry ordering dinner''" are so rare that it is unlikely that children will have heard them. Since they can nonetheless produce them, it was further argued that the structure is not learned but ''acquired'' from an innate cognitive language component. Generative grammarians then took as their task to find out all about innate structures through

introspection Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's sou ...

in order to form a picture of the hypothesised

language faculty The language module or language faculty is a hypothetical structure in the human brain which is thought to contain innate capacities for language, originally posited by Noam Chomsky. There is ongoing research into brain modularity in the fiel ...

. Generative grammar promotes a

modular Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a s ...

view of the mind, considering language as an autonomous mind module. Thus, language is separated from mathematical logic to the extent that inference plays no role in language acquisition. The generative conception of human cognition is also influential in

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Cognitive Linguistics (linguistics framework)

One of the approaches to cognitive linguistics is called Cognitive Linguistics, with capital initials, but it is also often spelled cognitive linguistics with all lowercase letters. This movement saw its beginning in early 1980s when

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wi ...

theory was united with

Cognitive Grammar Cognitive grammar is a cognitive approach to language developed by Ronald Langacker, which hypothesizes that grammar, semantics, and lexicon exist on a continuum instead of as separate processes altogether. This approach to language was one of the ...

, with subsequent models of

Construction Grammar Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...

following from various authors. The union entails two different approaches to

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and

cultural evolution Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation ...

: that of the

conceptual metaphor In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the pr ...

, and the construction. Cognitive Linguistics defines itself in opposition to generative grammar, arguing that language functions in the brain according to general cognitive principles. Lakoff's and Langacker's ideas are applied across sciences. In addition to linguistics and translation theory, Cognitive Linguistics is influential in

literary studies Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. T ...

education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...

musicology Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some m ...

and

theology Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing th ...

Conceptual metaphor theory

According to American linguist George Lakoff, ''metaphors'' are not just figures of speech, but modes of thought. Lakoff hypothesises that principles of abstract reasoning may have evolved from visual thinking and mechanisms for representing spatial relations that are present in lower animals. Conceptualisation is regarded as being based on the '' embodiment'' of knowledge, building on physical experience of vision and motion. For example, the 'metaphor' of emotion builds on downward motion while the metaphor of reason builds on upward motion, as in saying “The discussion ''fell'' to the emotional level, but I ''raised it back up'' to the rational plane." It is argued that language does not form an independent cognitive function but fully relies on other cognitive skills which include perception, attention, motor skills, and visual and spatial processing. Same is said of various other cognitive phenomena such as the

sense of time The study of time perception or chronoception is a field within psychology, cognitive linguistics and neuroscience that refers to the subjective experience, or sense, of time, which is measured by someone's own perception of the duration of the ind ...

: ::"In our visual systems, we have detectors for motion and detectors for objects/locations. We do not have detectors for time (whatever that could mean). Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion." —George Lakoff In Cognitive Linguistics, thinking is argued to be mainly automatic and unconscious. Cognitive linguists study the embodiment of knowledge by seeking expressions which relate to modal schemas. For example, in the expression "It is quarter to eleven", the preposition ''to'' represents a modal schema which is manifested in language as a visual or sensorimotoric 'metaphor'.

Cognitive and construction grammar

''Constructions'', as the basic units of grammar, are conventionalised form–meaning pairings which are comparable to memes as units of linguistic evolution. These are considered multi-layered. For example, idioms are higher-level constructions which contain words as middle-level constructions, and these may contain

morphemes A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone a ...

as lower-level constructions. It is argued that humans do not only share the same body type, allowing a common ground for embodied representations; but constructions provide common ground for uniform expressions within a speech community. Like biological organisms, constructions have life cycles which are studied by linguists. According to the cognitive and ''constructionist'' view, there is no grammar in the traditional sense of the word. What is commonly perceived as grammar is an inventory of constructions; a

complex adaptive system A complex adaptive system is a system that is '' complex'' in that it is a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components. It is '' adaptive'' in that the indiv ...

; or a population of constructions. Constructions are studied in all fields of language research from

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora ...

Integrative cognitive linguistics

There is also a third approach to cognitive linguistics, which neither directly supports the modular (Generative Grammar) nor the anti-modular (Cognitive Linguistics) view of the mind. Proponents of the third view argue that, according to brain research, language processing is specialized although not autonomous from other types of information processing. Language is thought of as one of the human cognitive abilities, along with perception, attention, memory, motor skills, and visual and spatial processing, rather than being subordinate to them. Emphasis is laid on a cognitive semantics that studies the contextual–conceptual nature of meaning.

Computational approaches

Cognitive perspective on natural language processing

Cognitive linguistics offers a scientific

first principle In philosophy and science, a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. First principles in philosophy are from First Cause attitudes and taught by Aristotelians, and nua ...

direction for quantifying states-of-mind through

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

. As mentioned earlier Cognitive Linguistics approaches grammar with a nontraditional view. Traditionally

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...

has been defined as a set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases and words in a natural language. From the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, grammar is seen as the rules of arrangement of language which best serve communication of the experience of the human organism through its cognitive skills which include perception, attention, motor skills, and visual and spatial processing. Such rules are derived from observing the conventionalized pairings of meaning to understand sub-context in the evolution of language patterns. The cognitive approach to identifying sub-context by observing what comes before and after each linguistic construct provides a grounding of meaning in terms of sensorimotoric embodied experience. When taken together, these two perspectives form the basis of defining approaches in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

with strategies to work through the symbol grounding problem which posits that, for a computer, a word is merely a symbol, which is a symbol for another symbol and so on in an unending chain without grounding in human experience. The broad set of tools and methods of

are available as

or NLP. Cognitive linguistics adds a new set of capabilities to NLP. These cognitive NLP methods enable software to analyze sub-context in terms of internal embodied experience.

Methods

The goal of

(NLP) is to enable a computer to "understand" the contents of text and documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The perspective o
Traditional Chomskyan Linguistics
offers NLP three approaches or methods to identify and quantify the literal contents, the who, what, where and when in text – in linguistic terms, the semantic meaning or

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...

of the text. The perspective of cognitive linguistics offers NLP a direction to identify and quantify the contextual nuances, the why and how in text – in linguistics terms, the implied pragmatic meaning or

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...

of text. The three NLP approaches to understanding literal semantics in text based on traditional linguistics are symbolic NLP, statistical NLP, and neural NLP. The first method, symbolic NLP (1950s - early 1990s) is based on first principles and rules of traditional linguistics. The second method, statistical NLP (1990s - 2010s), builds upon the first method with a layer of human curated & machine-assisted corpora for multiple contexts. The third approach neural NLP (2010 onwards), builds upon the earlier methods by leveraging advances in

deep neural network Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. D ...

-style methods to automate tabulation of corpora & parse models for multiple contexts in shorter periods of time. All three methods are used to power NLP techniques like

stemming In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morpholog ...

and

lemmatisation Lemmatisation ( or lemmatization) in linguistics is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word's lemma, or dictionary form. In computational linguistics, lemmati ...

in order to obtain statistically relevant listing of the who, what, where & when in text through named-entity recognition and

Topic model In statistics and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract "topics" that occur in a collection of documents. Topic modeling is a frequently used text-mining tool for discovery of hidden ...

programs. The same methods have been applied with NLP techniques like a bag-of-words model to obtain statistical measures of emotional context through

sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjec ...

programs. The accuracy of a sentiment analysis system is, in principle, how well it agrees with human judgments. Because evaluation of sentiment analysis is becoming more and more specialty based, each implementation needs a separate training model and specialized human verification raising Inter-rater reliability issues. However, the accuracy is considered generally acceptable for use in evaluating emotional context at a statistical or group level. A developmental trajectory of NLP to understand contextual pragmatics in text involving emulating intelligent behavior and apparent comprehension of natural language is cognitive NLP. This method is a rules based approach which involves assigning meaning to a word, phrase, sentence or piece of text based on the information presented before and after the piece of text being analyzed.

Controversy

The specific meaning of cognitive linguistics, the proper address of the name, and the scientific status of the enterprise have been called into question. Criticism includes an overreliance on introspective data, a lack of experimental testing of hypotheses and little integration of findings from other fields of cognitive science. Some researchers go as far as to consider calling the field 'cognitive' at all a misnomer. Members of such frameworks are also said to have used other researchers’ findings to present them as their own work. While this criticism is accepted for most part, it is claimed that some of the research has nonetheless produced useful insights.

References

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