COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AS APPOSISION TO STRUCTURAL AND GENERATIVE APPROACHES<br />By<br />Inas Haider Kadhum <br />Al Mustaqbal University College, Iraq <br />English Department <br />Key words: Cognitive linguistics CL <br /><br /> Cognitive Linguistics (henceforth CL) is about language, communication, and cognition. They are mutually inextricable. Cognition and language create each other. Language has come to represent the world as we know it; it is deal with our perceptual experience. Language is used to organize, process, and convey information, from one person to another, from one embodied mind to another. Learning language consist of shaping structure from usage and this, like learning about all other features of the world, includes the full possibility of cognition: the remembering of utterances and episodes, the classification of experience, the determination of patterns among and between stimuli, the overview of conceptual schema and prototypes from exemplars, and the use of cognitive models, of metaphors, analogies, and images in thinking(Langacker,1999:19). Language is used to focus the listener’s attention to the world; it can foreground different elements in the theatre of consciousness to potentially relate many different stories and perspectives about the same scene. What is attended is learned, and so attention controls the acquisition of language itself. The jobs of language in discourse determine language usage and language learning. Cognition, consciousness, experience, embodiment, brain, self, human interaction, society, culture, and history are all inextricably intertwined in rich, complex, and dynamic ways in language (ibid). Cognitive linguists see that in everyday life, interaction there lies a host of mental and conceptual processes that underlie such a relationship; “interaction is critically<br />dependent on the embodied minds that engage in it, and cannot be properly understood or described without a detailed characterization of the conceptions they entertain” (ibid).<br />While Chomsky and his adherents propose that “there is a specific ‘organ’ in the human brain devoted exclusively to language” (Lee, 2001: 2), cognitivists believe that “linguistic structure is a direct reflex of cognition in the sense that a particular linguistic expression is associated with a particular way of conceptualizing a given situation” (ibid). In other words, language must be explained according to its relation to the mind and other cognitive functions not as a modular structure as generative linguists claim the case to be. <br /> The term 'CL' refers to the branch of linguistics which is emerged in the 1970s in opposition to previous structural and generative approaches to language description. Focusing on the relationship between language and mind, it attempts to explain the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, production and understanding of speech and writing. Cognitive linguists hold that language is based on the human subject's experience in, and interaction with the world. Language form and use emerge from conceptualization, from the way in which human experience is perceived and conceptualized. In fact, the cognitive linguistic enterprise emerged as a dissatisfactory movement with the dominating Generative paradigm in linguistics in the 1970s. Evans and Green(2006: 6) describe it as:<br />a ‘movement’ or an ‘enterprise’ because it is not a specific theory. Instead, it is an approach that has adopted a common set of guiding principles, assumptions and perspectives which had led to a diverse range of complementary, overlapping (and sometimes competing) theories.<br /> CL is rooted in the research that was carried out in the 1960s by scientists working in artificial intelligence. These scientists aimed at proposing a theory about how human beings process language. They realized that to process even the basic sentences, computers could refer to a huge store of information. Likewise, they came up with the explanation that human cognition is structured around scripts which are knowledge stores that contain information about familiar events and situations. This view, which was then broadly known as the schema theory, proposes that when human beings are put in novel situations, like being in a Japanese restaurant with all its peculiar traditions, for the first time, they adjust or add to their own scripts of this same situation so as to figure out how to cope with this novel situation (Gavins, 2007: 3).<br />Around the same time, research was carried out in the field of artificial intelligence, a host of important advances were also being made in Cognitive Psychology. Basically, psychologists “have struggled to apply various linguistic theories to explain language acquisition, production, and comprehension” (Gibbs, 2007: 2). They assumed that human beings create mental representations of situations that are completely new by virtue of their linguistic interaction (Gavins, 2007: 4). <br /> CL is an approach to the study of language informed by both linguistics and psychology. It describes how language interfaces with cognition, and how it adapts in the course of language usage, phylogenetically in language evolution, ontogenetically in language acquisition, and moment-to-moment in situated, on-line language processing and performance( Robinson and Ellis, 2008:3). <br />References<br />Evans, V. & Green, M. (2006).Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.<br />Gavins, J. (2007). Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. <br />Langacker, R. (1999). Assessing the Cognitive Linguistic Enterprise. In T. Janssen and G. Redeker (eds.) Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruytr.<br />_______________. (2002). Cognitive Grammar: Lecture Notes. UCSD<br />Lee, D. (2001). Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University press.<br />Robinson, P. & Ellis, N. (eds.). (2008). Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. New York/London: Routledge.<br /><br /><br />