cognitivelinguistic

Cognitive linguistics, sometimes written cognitivelinguistic, is a branch of linguistics that studies the relationship between language and cognition. It maintains that language encodes general cognitive processes and is grounded in bodies, perception, and experience, rather than being an autonomous module separate from meaning.

Central to cognitive linguistics is the view that meaning is not separate from form but emerges from usage, context, and embodied experience. Grammar is seen as a set of constructions—paired form and meaning—that speakers store and generalize from language use. Key concepts include schema theory, frame semantics, prototype-based categorization, and conceptual metaphor theory, which explains how abstract domains are understood in terms of more concrete experiences.

Major frameworks include construction grammar (Adele Goldberg) and cognitive grammar (Ronald Langacker). Construction grammar treats sentence structure as composed of conventionalized form-meaning pairs; cognitive grammar emphasizes that grammatical knowledge reflects conceptual structure and categorization.

Methodologically, cognitive linguists employ psycholinguistic experiments, corpus studies, neurolinguistic evidence, and cross-linguistic data; it emphasizes language acquisition as the gradual development of schematic representations.

Cognitive linguistics situates itself in dialogue with psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology, and contrasts with generative approaches that emphasize innate syntactic rules. Criticism includes concerns about vagueness or lack of falsifiable hypotheses, though proponents argue that the approach yields testable predictions about metaphor, polysemy, and language use.