Cognitive Linguistic Vs Autonomous One
Cognitive Linguistic Vs Autonomous One
Cognitive Linguistic Vs Autonomous One
Followingly, Taylor exposes the polemic seen through two Cognitive Linguistics:
Langacker and Lakoff.
Langacker offers Cognitive Grammar so as to replace the Generative one.
Some of the points that the so-mentioned author made was the rule/list fallacy
(Langacker 1987: 42). According to him, it is fallacious to assume that what can
be accounted for by rue needs to be separately listed. Instead, his postion is
that general statements (rules) and particular statements (lists) "can perfectly
well coexist in the cognitive representation of linguistic phenomena.
In the case of Lakoff, the gulf separating Cognitive Linguistics and Generative
Linguistics is profound and relates to the "primary commitments" which is "to
view language in terms of systems of combinatorial mathematics" (Lakoff 1990:
43). For Cognitive Linguistics, the primary commitment is "to make one's
account of human language accord with what is generally known about the
mind and the brain, from other disciplines as well as our own" (40). According to
Lakoff, these primary commitments not only lead to different analyses of data;
they also determine the kinds of data that are brought under investigation and
may even lead to different understandings of what linguistic is.
3. SOME HISTORY
In the third section, Taylor provides the reader an outline of linguistic's
development trajectory, from its beginnings until the present days.
Firstly, in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the usa, linguistic was
dominated above all by descriptive grammar, being Bloomfield the major text
book. That is, linguistics were focused on accumulating data from several
languages so as to analyze it. It was in 1957 when a great shift happened in
this science after the publication of Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957). The
author claimed that the aim of this science was not the corpus but the system
of rules which a native speaker was able to produced. In short time, there
appeared many types of tests (cf. tests diagnosing complements as opposed to
adjuncts, tests for confirming the status of a nominal as clausal subject among
others) whose goal were to verify the grammaticality of a sentence. In 1965, it
came another determining contribution by Chomsky with the publication of
Aspects of Theory of Syntax. This brought out the cognitive state of a speaker
as well as the innateness of language. Therefore, as Taylor points out this
change signaled the emergence of linguistics as a cognitive science. As a
consequence, nowadays the vast majority of today's linguistics take into
consideration those descriptive tools acquired from Bloomfields as well as
Chomsky's beliefs and methodologies.
phenomenon, thus the neuronal structure of the brain was taken into
consideration (cf. Lamb). They verified that cognitive abilities were essential in
the linguistic investigation. For instance, many general cognitive abilities, known
as "construal operations" proved the fact that " linguistic expressions do not,
and cannot, designate a state of affairs as it "objectively" is; rather, the scene
must be processed and conceptualized by the human mind.
The feature that differentiates Cognitive Linguistics from other approaches in
counteraction to the Chomskyan ones is the symbolic view of language ( Noble
and Davidson 1996; Deacon 1997). Actually, symbolic thought is proved to be
supported by human cognitive abilities such as empathy (Lieberman 1991) and
joint attention ( Tomasello 1999).
Finally, according to John R. Taylor, another distinction is that Langacker's
Cognitive Grammar is divided on three objects of study: phonological
representations, semantic representations and symbolic relations between
phonological and semantic representations.
is
bound
to
be
inadequate,
he
proposes highly
schematic
constituents of a passive clause ( cf. the verb to be, the participle, the optional
by-phrase) so as to identify their function in the passive sentence in relation to