Definition:
A cluster of overlapping approaches to the study of language as a mental phenomenon. See also:
Observations:
- "Language offers a window into cognitive function, providing insights into the nature, structure and organization of thoughts and ideas. The most important way in which cognitive linguistics differs from other approaches to the study of language, then, is that language is assumed to reflect certain fundamental properties and design features of the human mind."
(Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Routledge, 2006) - "Cognitive Linguistics is the study of language in its cognitive function, where cognitive refers to the crucial role of intermediate informational structures with our encounters with the world. Cognitive linguistics . . . [assumes] that our interaction with the world is mediated through informational structures in the mind. It is more specific than cognitive psychology, however, by focusing on natural language as a means for organizing, processing, and conveying that information."
(D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007) - "Cognitive psychologists, and others, criticize cognitive linguistic work because it is so heavily based on individual analysts' intuitions . . ., and thus does not constitute the kind of objective, replicable data preferred by many scholars in the cognitive and natural sciences (e.g., data collected on large numbers of naive participants under controlled laboratory conditions)."
(Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., "Why Cognitive Linguists Should Care More About Empirical Methods," Methods in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Mónica González-Márquez et al. John Benjamins, 2007)
