XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

Cognitive linguistics is the direction of modern linguistics, the focus of which is language as a general cognitive mechanism, as a tool for organizing, processing and transmitting information, and at the same time as a kind of human ability to learn.

The sphere of interests of cognitive linguistics includes the “mental” bases of understanding and producing speech in terms of how the structures of language knowledge are represented and involved in the processing of information.

One of the most important tasks of cognitive linguistics is the systematic description and explanation of the mechanisms of human language learning and the principles of structuring these mechanisms.

Cognitive linguists are primarily interested in such phenomena as regular polysemy, cognitive models and metaphor as a universal cognitive technique.

Cognitive linguistics originated in the United States, this direction is more commonly called "cognitive grammar." In 1975, the term "cognitive grammar" was first introduced in the article by J. Lakoff and G. Thompson "Introducing Cognitive Grammar". In 1985, cognitive grammar was presented to the domestic reader in a review by V.I. Gerasimov; at the same time, the first English edition of J.Fauconnier's Mental Spaces (French — a year earlier), which “plunged” traditional logical-pragmatic issues into the cognitive environment, was published. In 1987, the first volume of the Foundations of Cognitive Grammar by R. Langacker (the second in 1991), as well as the staged books for the direction of the book Women by Fire and Dangerous Objects by J. Lakoff and The Body in Thinking (Eng. The Body in the Mind) M. Johnson, as well as the beginning of a whole series of monographs of R. Jakendoff his book "Consciousness and computational thinking." In the 1990s, Jackendoff succeeded in creating a successive with respect to generativeism, and not the variant of cognitive grammar that opposes it. In 1988, the USSR devoted to the cognitive aspects of language XXIII in the series “New in foreign linguistics”, and in the famous publishing house “Benjamins” saw the light of the first large and representative collection of articles “Problems of cognitive linguistics” edited by B. Rudzki-Ostyn. In 1995, a collection of translations, Language and Intellect, appeared. Since 1990, the journal Cognitive Linguistics has been published, which can be considered the beginning of the institutionalization of the field as an academic discipline. No less important stages in the development of cognitive grammar were the articles by L.Talmi of the 1980s, C.Fillmore and W.Chaif (integrated into the 1994 book Discourse, Consciousness and Time). In the mid-1990s, the first textbooks on cognitive linguistics came out in Europe: “Introduction to cognitive linguistics” (1996, authors F. Ungerer and H.-J. Schmidt) and “Cognitive foundations of grammar” (B. Heine, 1997). To form an interest in cognitive problems among Russian linguists, the publication of works on modeling the understanding of natural language also played an important role: Russian translations of books by T.Vinograd “A program that understands natural language” (1976, original 1972) and R. Schenk with colleagues "(1980, original 1975), as well as the XII volume of the" New in Foreign Linguistics ", specifically devoted to this topic.

Until the early 1990s, CL was a set of individual research programs - these are the research programs of J. Lakoff (often speaking with co-authors), R. Langaker, L. Talmi, U. Chafe, R. Jaekendoff, C. Fillmore (all US). Each of these linguists began to develop their own approach to the description of language and language theory, focused on a specific set of phenomena and problems. One of the important assumptions shared by all these scholars is that meaning is so essential to a language that it should be in the focus of research. Language structures perform the function of expressing meanings and, therefore, the correspondence of meaning and form is the main object of linguistic analysis. Language forms, from this point of view, are closely related to the semantic structure, which they are intended (called) to express. The semantic structures of all meaningful language units can and should be investigated.

Other linguists who developed their own criteria for linguistic description in the cognitive direction in the 1970s were Sydney Lamb (stratification linguistics, later neurocognitive linguistics) and Dick Hudson (word grammar).

Many writings on the subject of mastering the language of a child in the 1970s were influenced by Piaget and the cognitive revolution in the field of psychology, so that the sphere of mastering the language had a strong functional / cognitive basis in this period, which continues to the present. The works of Dan Zlobin, Eva Clark, Elizabeth Bates and Melissa Bowerman formed the basis of modern research in the cognitive direction. A number of linguistic research programs come closer to them, the authors of which share CL installations to some extent, although they are not among the notorious cognitiveists: T. van Dijk (Netherlands), J. Hayman (Canada), T. Givon (USA) . The results significant for CL were published by D. Herherts (Holland), E.Switser, T.Reghir, A.Goldberg (all USA). At the same time, in the 1990s, the circle of those linguistic phenomena that are affected to some extent and in one form or another by all or most of the research programs, as well as the totality of the results, between which one can undoubtedly establish a connection, is gradually delineated. Cognitive linguistics, originally united only by cognitive attitudes and the initial hypothesis about the explanatory power of turning to mental categories, gradually acquires its subject, its internal structure and its categorical apparatus.

References:

Maslova V.A. Introduction to cognitive linguistics. - M.: 2004, p.6-7;

Demyankov V.Z. Cognitive linguistics as a kind of interpretive approach // Questions of linguistics, 1994. No. 4. P.17-33;

Vorkachev K.A. Basics of linguistics. - M: 2001, p.47-48.