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THE COGNITIVE APPROACH TO LANGUAGE - Coggle Diagram
THE COGNITIVE APPROACH TO LANGUAGE
the goal of cognitive linguistics
to explain how
the mind works
Natural language
part of our overall cognitive
make-up
relates to
perception
reasoning
imagination
experience of our body and the world around us
a product of the human mind
Cognitive domains
Some of the
conceptual background
evoked serves as the basis for characterizing a category. Langacker describes such background knowledge characterizing a linguistic unit as its base or
cognitive domain.
A word may evoke
different culture-specific domains.
Categories
a conceptual unit formed for things that are relevant, or matter, to the people of a community
In our early stages of concept formation we begin structuring our mental world.
The process of category formation is reinforced by having a label for a category.
In the classical view, categories are
discrete entities that are characterized by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions
can be defined by a set of
conditions but that such senses are typically restricted to a technical domain
categories are flexible enough to meet all
communicative needs.
key
concepts in Cognitive Linguistics
motivation
functional explanation
Taxonomies
Most categories are located in a hierarchical structure whose superordinate categories pass their defining features on to the categories at the level below them.
folk taxonomies attach different cognitive salience to the
hierarchical levels.
Prototypes
In cognitive psychology, such salient subcategories have been described as prototypes.
Prototypes are those members of a category that are felt to be the best, i.e. the most central, salient ant typical subcategories or individuals of their category
George Lakoff (1987: 80-4) has demonstrated that subcategories are also used to comprehend the category as a whole.
cognitive properties of language
the meaning of a category, or a word, is not solely defined by lexical features but may also include social stereotypes.
since most categories have prototype structure, we may assume that categories in general are understood in terms of their prototypes
our understanding of categories is governed by metonymy.
Conceptual frames
Associations evoked
by a category, or word, are usually referred to as a conceptual frame.
Conceptual frames are
coherent packages
of knowledge that surround a category.
Frames make situations
meaningful
and allow us
to make inferences
Scripts
A script is a
mundane series of subevents
of a complex event.
Mental spaces and conceptual blending
provide the conceptual background which enables us to
contextualize and assess the ideas presented to us by the speaker
typically represent the speaker‘s status of knowledge and are invoked in communication by expressions known as "space-builders"
short-lived packages of knowledge evoked in on-line communication are known as mental spaces.