Cognitive And Communicative Approaches To Linguistic Analysis

"This volume is the product of a Columbia School Linguistics Conference held at Rutgers University in October 1999, where the plenary speaker was Ronald W. Langacker, a founder of Cognitive Linguistics. The goal of the book is to promote two kinds of dialogue. First, dialogue between Cognitive Grammar and the particular sign-based approach to language known as the Columbia School." "The second kind of dialogue is that among several sign-based approaches themselves and also between them and two competitors: grammaticalization theory and generic functionalism. Topics range from phonology to discourse. Analytical problems are taken from a wide range of languages including English, German, Guarani, Hebrew, Hualapai, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Mandarin, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Urdu, and Yaqui."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Usage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures, language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines, the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory, in historical linguists and in language typology.

The studies in the present volume illustrate the current state-of-the-art in the corpus-based approach in cognitive linguistics, which seeks to motivate linguistic phenomena through the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. By focusing on language use in different contexts from a variety of perspectives, each of the contributions in this volume presents its own unique take on the intertwined relationship between language, thought, and communication. Thus, each article shows how a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques helps shed new light on old issues, reflecting the usage-based nature of cognitive linguistics and illustrating the explanatory adequacy of corpus-based methods. Originally published as special issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics 17:1 (2019).

This volume offers the first comprehensive description of English imperatives made from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. It proposes a new way of explaining the meaning and function of the imperative independently of illocutionary act classifications, which allows for quantifying the strength of imperative force in terms of parameters and numerical values. Furthermore, the book applies the theory of Construction Grammar to account for the felicity of imperatives in complex sentences. The model of description explains explicitly a wide range of phenomena, including frequency of use, prototypical vs. non-prototypical uses of the English imperative and the choice between longer vs. shorter directives including the imperative. A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of the English Imperative: With Special Reference to Japanese Imperatives is intended for both researchers and students interested in the English imperative and Directive Speech Acts at large and for the linguists working within the Cognitive Linguistics and/or Construction Grammar approach.

Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition aims to bring cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology closer together, calling for further investigations of language and culture from cognitively-informed perspectives against the backdrop of the current trend of linguistic anthropology.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

Functional approaches to the study of language may not only be used to characterize discourse structures, but also to assess their communicative quality. In fact, discourse analysis and evaluation are conceptually related activities. In this volume the link between analysis and evaluation is explored in seven studies discussing a variety of discourse genres like package inserts, telephone openings, survey interviews, meetings, government brochures and direct mail letters. The analytical concepts used stem from different strands of research into language, including cognitive linguistics, pragmalinguistics, conversational analysis and persuasion research.

From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed, "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, perspectives, discourse context, social interaction, and communicative goals. The account of human linguistic competence emerging from this new paradigm should be extremely useful to scientists studying how human beings (not formal devices) comprehend, produce, and acquire natural languages. The current volume brings together 10 of the most important linguists in cognitive and functional linguistics whose work is often not easily available to those outside the field. In original contributions, each of these scholars focuses on an important aspect of human linguistic competence, with a special eye to readers who are not professional linguists. Of special importance to all of the contributions are the cognitive and social interactional processes that constitute human linguistic communication. The book is of special interest to psychologists, cognitive scientists, psycholinguists, and developmental psycholinguists, in addition to linguists taking a more psychological approach to language.