The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Wen Xu, John R. Taylor, Wen Xu, John R. Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351034685
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics provides a comprehensive introduction and essential reference work to cognitive linguistics. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives and approaches, covering all the key areas of cognitive linguistics and drawing on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, biolinguistics, ecolinguistics, evolutionary linguistics, neuroscience, language pedagogy, and translation studies.

The forty-three chapters, written by international specialists in the field, cover four major areas:

• Basic theories and hypotheses, including cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics, natural semantic metalanguage, and word grammar;

• Central topics, including embodiment, image schemas, categorization, metaphor and metonymy, construal, iconicity, motivation, constructionalization, intersubjectivity, grounding, multimodality, cognitive pragmatics, cognitive poetics, humor, and linguistic synaesthesia, among others;

• Interfaces between cognitive linguistics and other areas of linguistic study, including cultural linguistics, linguistic typology, figurative language, signed languages, gesture, language acquisition and pedagogy, translation studies, and digital lexicography;

• New directions in cognitive linguistics, demonstrating the relevance of the approach to social, diachronic, neuroscientific, biological, ecological, multimodal, and quantitative studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is an indispensable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and for all researchers working in this area.

Part I

Basic Theories and Hypotheses

1

Cognitive Semantics

Dirk Geeraerts

1. Introduction

Cognitive semantics as meant in this chapter refers to the diverse set of models developed within cognitive linguistics for the description of linguistic meaning. This includes concepts like prototypicality, radial networks, metaphor, metonymy, frame semantics, and a wide range of construal mechanisms in grammar (see section 3 for a more systematic overview). As all of these models are treated in detail in separate chapters of this Handbook, the present chapter intends to focus on the shared characteristics of these descriptive models: what is it that brings them together, and why do they go under the label of cognitive semantics? That question will be answered from three different perspectives. The first perspective approaches the matter in the wider framework of the history of linguistic thinking: why is the study of meaning so particularly important for cognitive linguistics, when we situate cognitive linguistics at large against the background of the history of linguistics? Or in other words: how does cognitive semantics, understood as the cluster of concepts illustrated above, contribute crucially to the position of cognitive linguistics in the development of linguistic theory? A second approach for looking beyond the individual approaches involves their mutual relations: what are the links that connect these various models? How are they complementary with regard to each other in covering the domain of natural language semantics? And in addition, looking for commonality rather than complementarity: what are the shared features that allow us to claim that cognitive semantics is indeed a more or less coherent framework for the description of meaning, rather than a loose collection of weakly connected formats? To round off, we will look beyond the separate ideas in yet another way, by looking forward rather than backward: what open fundamental questions does semantic description in cognitive linguistics face, and how might they influence the further development of the field? (The chapter brings together a number of ideas included in Geeraerts 2006, 2016.)

2. Cognitive Semantics in the Recent History of Natural Language Semantics

To understand the specific position of cognitive linguistics in the history of linguistic semantics, we first need to get back to the beginning of generative grammar. In the framework defined by Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures of 1957, meaning does not play a role in the conception of grammaticality (and a fortiori, in the grammar as the rule system governing that grammaticality). The iconic sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is considered meaningless, but at the same time it is taken to be grammatical, because its syntactic structure corresponds entirely to a fully grammatical sentence like Bright young linguists talk endlessly. Meaningfulness in other words is not a criterion for grammaticality, but syntactic well-formedness is.

In the 1965 model defined by Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky switches position. The description of meaning is incorporated into the grammar, and while Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is still considered to be meaningless, it acquires the status of an ungrammatical sentence that needs to be excluded by the formal grammar. The incorporation of meaning and semantic well-formedness into the heart of the grammar does however create a problem in combination with the notion of transformation, which was at that point another crucial aspect of the formal framework of generative grammar. The algorithmic description of the grammatical structures of a language went in two steps. First, phrase structure rules produce an initial syntactic tree (the so-called ‘deep structure’), which may then, second, be transformed into a different type of tree, the ‘surface structure’. The question whether transformations are meaning-preserving then became a hotly debated topic in generative theory, ultimately leading to a rift between two virulently opposed camps.

On the one hand, if you believe that transformations are meaning-preserving, all the semantic information you need is already available in the deep structure, and the deep structure as such becomes equivalent to semantic description. Semantics accordingly takes precedence in the linguistic description. This was the position taken by the so-called Generative Semantics movement, which in works like McCawley (1968) developed its program by creating a rather awkward fusion of linguistic syntax with descriptive notions taken from formal logic.

On the other hand, if you believe that transformations can change meaning, the primacy of syntax can be maintained: semantic interpretation will be placed at the end of the process of building grammatical tree structures. This was the position that was ultimately favored by Chomsky, for reasons that can be easily understood in light of one of Chomsky’s basic motives, namely to explain the process of language acquisition. If, like Chomsky, you believe in a genetic endowment for language, then it is highly unlikely that that genetic module will involve something as ephemeral and diverse and variable as meaning. If there is an ingrained linguistic knowledge at all, it is more likely to pertain to the formal, structural aspects of the language, i.e., to syntax, precisely also because syntax underlies that other main feature of language emphasized by Chomsky: the capacity of human beings to produce an infinite number of different sentences.

So, within the generative tradition, Generative Semantics lost out against so-called Interpretive Semantics, which then became the first of a series of successive models within generative grammar ultimately leading to the current notion of Universal Grammar. What all of these models (and a number of other theories of formal grammar) have in common is the idea of an autonomous syntax, i.e., the notion that the syntax of the language is a module of the grammar that stands on its own and that can be described largely independently of considerations of meaning and function. Such a module may surely interact with semantics and pragmatics, but essentially works according to its own set of principles. But importantly, and somewhat ironically, the demise of Generative Semantics within the generative grammar tradition became an important stimulus for the development of semantics in two different traditions outside of generative grammar. First, some of the linguists who were active in the broad circle of Generative Semantics became founding figures of what we now know as cognitive linguistics. This applies to George Lakoff and Ron Langacker, and to some extent also to Charles Fillmore, who was a major inspiration for cognitive linguistics but who never self-identified as a cognitive linguist. Second, the rapprochement with logical semantics which was rather clumsily executed by Generative Semantics triggered people with a background in logic, like Richard Montague (1974) and Barbara Partee (1976), to develop a formal kind of natural language semantics that was firmly and unambiguously rooted in logical semantics, and that became the basis for the very rich tradition of formal semantics as we currently know it.

So overall, from the point of view of semantics, we may distinguish three broad strands of thought in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cognitive Linguistics: Retrospect and Prospect
• Part I Basic Theories and Hypotheses
• Part II Central Topics in Cognitive Linguistics
• Part III Interface between Cognitive Linguistics and Other Fields or Disciplines
• Part IV New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics
• Index