Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives
General orientation of the volume: towards an empirical revolution
The collective volume Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives brings together specific case studies and critical overviews of work in a variety of CL strands. Written by prominent researchers, the subjects of the volume thus provide the scientific community with an updated survey of recent research in Cognitive Linguistics. Most authors furthermore go beyond the more immediate scope of describing or exemplifying state-of-the-art research (e.g. by providing the reader with a generally accessible synthesis or a specialized case study) and explicitly address a number of pressing questions pertaining to future perspectives and future research agendas.
Together with its companion volume Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (Cognitive Linguistics Research 34, edited by Dirk Geeraerts), it constitutes a highly informative resource for linguists and scholars in neighboring disciplines, and in general for any scholar wishing to become familiar with what Cognitive Linguistics is all about. Whereas Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings offers an introductory survey of the foundational concepts of Cognitive Linguistics, the present volume focuses on more recent theoretical developments, illustrates the many fields of application that CL already covers (both within linguistics and in an interdisciplinary environment), and identifies the future research trends that CL is now heading for.
At the same time, the present volume is the very first issue in the new book series Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (ACL). In collaboration with its sister series Cognitive Linguistics Research, ACL offers a platform for high quality work which applies the rich framework developed in Cognitive Linguistics to a wide range of different fields of application. These fields include descriptive linguistics, cultural linguistics, language acquisition, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, visual communication, stylistics, poetics, pedagogical linguistics, computational linguistics, signed language and still many other fields, often within an interdisciplinary framework.
First and foremost, however, as the subtitle suggests, the volume overviews and explores the major avenues of the cognitive linguistic enterprise at present and towards the future. Over the last two, perhaps even three, decades, Cognitive Linguistics has gradually but firmly established itself as a complete and innovating discipline, but certainly not one which for these reasons has ceased to evolve, nor to expand. The contributions in this volume testify to the existence of a number of different strands, the most important of which may be summarized as follows. First, a number of basic concepts (cf. the twelve cornerstones of Cognitive Linguistics described and exemplified in Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings) are currently being critically refined or even challenged. Second, the fact that Cognitive Linguistics is fully committed to the analysis of meaning in all its various facets naturally lends itself to multiple applications in all those areas of human communication where meaningfulness is relevant. Hence, the range of applications is expanding, not only across disciplines, but also within linguistics itself. This volume is a representative, but necessarily non-exhaustive illustration of this trend: while it covers a broader perspective than most other “readers” or “introductions” to Cognitive Linguistics, it obviously cannot reflect all of the many burgeoning applications. And last, but not least, there is a call for increasing methodological depth, to ensure a firm position for CL within Cognitive Science at large.
While we focus on fundamental theoretical and methodological issues, we then either discuss or exemplify the extent to which the cognitive linguistic framework can be applied in a variety of neighboring disciplines (i.e. interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary applications) or to a wide range of practical language-related phenomena (applied linguistics). The distinction between these two main areas (theory and method vs. interdisciplinary applications and applied linguistics) is not, however, meant as a strictly separated one.
In ‘The cognitive base’, addresses issues which in various ways relate to the basic tenet that Cognitive Linguistics is fundamentally usage-based. We open on linguistic methodology and emphasizes the necessity of an empirical revolution. The mental lexicon is seen as the highly flexible result of numerous usage events, and the various grammar models such as cognitive grammar, construction grammar, and radical construction grammar are revisited in terms of notational variants. The ‘The conceptual leap’, looks into the embodied basis and nature of conceptual metaphor, the semiotic and indexical basis of conceptual metonymy, and the rhetorical potential of conceptual blending. The ‘The psychological basis’, exhibits a possible implementation of the empirical revolution to the area of metaphor research.
We will exemplify a representative selection of fields of application. The first is, ‘Go tell it on the mountain,’ which focuses on language, culture and thought. It opens with a dialogue between cognitive linguistics and anthropological linguistics, thus emphasizing the cultural core of language and the linguistic core of culture. Another long-established field is second and foreign language education (or ‘pedagogical linguistics’), which can boast of a long tradition of empirical research, but which is still in the process of discovering the “motivational” potential of a cognition- and usage-based approach to foreign language teaching and learning. ‘The verbal and beyond’, extends the research on verbal modes of expression to other modes of conceptual self-expression. The cognitive-linguistic approach is applied to the visual modes of expression as exploited in signed languages and in the manipulation of visual metaphors in the media-dominated communication landscape. Similarly, the imaginative realities of poetic text worlds are explored in a cognitive analysis of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”, a choice that serves as a symbol and pun for the wall between linguistics and literary studies. In ‘Virtual reality’, computer linguistics is looking at cognitive linguistics and lays down the conditions that have to be fulfilled in order to make it testable for computational experimentation.
