Areas of Study
Cognitive linguistics is divided into three main areas of study:
- Cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics, separating semantics (meaning) into meaning-construction and knowledge representation.
- Cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax, morphology and other traditionally more grammar-oriented areas.
- Cognitive phonology, dealing with classification of various correspondences between morphemes and phonetic sequences.
Aspects of cognition that are of interest to cognitive linguists include:
- Construction grammar and cognitive grammar.
- Conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.
- Image schemas and force dynamics.
- Conceptual organization: Categorization, Metonymy, Frame semantics, and Iconicity.
- Construal and Subjectivity.
- Gesture and sign language.
- Linguistic relativity.
- Cultural linguistics.
Related work that interfaces with many of the above themes:
- Computational models of metaphor and language acquisition.
- Dynamical models of language acquisition
- Conceptual semantics, pursued by generative linguist Ray Jackendoff is related because of its active psychological realism and the incorporation of prototype structure and images.
Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to mesh together these findings into a coherent whole. A further complication arises because the terminology of cognitive linguistics is not entirely stable, both because it is a relatively new field and because it interfaces with a number of other disciplines.
Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming accepted ways of analysing literary texts, too. Cognitive Poetics, as it has become known, has become an important part of modern stylistics.
Read more about this topic: Cognitive Linguistics
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