Description

What is Cognitive Linguistics? "Cognitive linguistics goes beyond the visible structure of language and investigates the considerably more complex backstage operations of cognition that create grammar, conceptualization, discourse, and thought itself. The theoretical insights of cognitive linguistics are based on extensive empirical observation in multiple contexts, and on experimental work in psychology and neuroscience. Results of cognitive linguistics, especially from metaphor theory and conceptual integration theory, have been applied to wide ranges of nonlinguistic phenomena." —Gilles Fauconnier. 2006. "Cognitive Linguistics." Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. John Wiley & Sons. Pdf of full article.

This course is at the center of the conception of the distinctive cognitive science program at Case, which emphasizes human higher-order cognition in activities that distinguish human beings from other species, and particularly behaviors for which there are no animal models. Language is preeminent among these behaviors. Cognitive linguistics is a central part of cognitive science. As William Croft and Alan Cruse write in their 2004 introduction to the field:

"Cognitive linguistics is taken here to refer to the approach to the study of language that began to emerge in the 1970s and has been increasingly active since the 1980s (now endowed with an international society with biennial conferences and a journal, Cognitive Linguistics). A quarter century later, a vast amount of research has been generated under the name of cognitive linguistics. Most of the research has focused on semantics, but a significant proportion also is devoted to syntax and morphology, and there has been cognitive linguistic research into other areas of linguistics such as language acquisition, phonology and historical linguistics." —Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.)

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