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2. Some history
Cognitive linguistics has its origins in the late 1970s, when a number of linguists became
increasingly dissatisfied with the then-prevailing generative paradigm with its focus on
an autonomous formal grammar, and began to develop alternative approaches which
emphasize function and meaning and the relationship between language and general
cognitive processes (see, for example, Langacker 1979; Lakoff 1977; Talmy 1978).
These early attempts began to combine into a more coherent and self-conscious move-
ment about ten years later, with the publication in 1987 of George Lakoff’s Women, Fire
and Dangerous Things and Ron Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, and,
in the following year, of Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, an influential collection of
articles edited by Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn. The next year, 1989, can be regarded as the
official birth date of the movement. In the spring of this year, René Dirven organized a
symposium in Duisburg at which the International Cognitive Linguistics Association
(ICLA) was established. It was also decided to create a new journal, Cognitive Linguis-
tics, and a monograph series entitled Cognitive Linguistics Research; both are published
by De Gruyter Mouton. The Duisburg Symposium was retrospectively renamed the First
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference.
Much of the early work in CL focussed on topics that were particularly problematic
for generative approaches − prototype effects, radial categories, metaphor and metony-
my, and the meaning of grammatical elements which were traditionally regarded as
meaningless; but as the approach grew in strength, it expanded into virtually every area
of linguistic organization. Several distinct strands emerged, including cognitive grammar,
construction grammar, mental space and blending theory, neural theory of language, as
well as a large body of more descriptive corpus-based work united under the banner of
“usage-based” linguistics.
Today, there are several book series and at least fourteen journals devoted largely or
entirely to CL (including Cognitive Linguistics, Language and Cognition, Review of
Cognitive Linguistics, CogniTextes, International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, Con-
structions and Frames and Voprosy kognitivnoj lingvistiki). The International Cognitive
Linguistics Assocation [http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/] has over 300 individual
members and nearly 500 linguists attend the biennial International Cognitive Linguistics
Conference. Sixteen regional and national organizations are affiliated with the ICLA.
More and more universities offer courses in CL at undergraduate and postgraduate level;
and there is growing interest from related disciplines, in particular, first and second
language acquisition, adult psycholinguistics, and clinical linguistics, but also psycholo-
gy, philosophy, and computer science.
language, including embodiment (Bergen), attention and salience (Tomlin and Myachy-
kov), entrenchment and its relationship to frequency (Divjak and Caldwell-Harris), cate-
gorization (Ramscar), analogy, schematization and naïve discriminative learning (Baayen
and Ramscar), construal (Langacker), metonymy (Barcelona), metaphor (Gibbs), blend-
ing (Turner), conceptualization (Speed, Vinson and Vigliocco) and collaborative commu-
nication (Verhagen).
Part 2: Overviews consists of comprehensive surveys of the major subfields within the
discipline. There are chapters on the basic areas of linguistic organization, i.e., phonology
(Nathan), lexical semantics (Geeraerts) and construction grammar (Diessel), as well as
chapters examining language use in a wider context: language variation and change
(Kristiansen and Geeraerts, Hilpert), first and second language acquisition (Matthews
and Krajewski, Ellis and Wulff), and discourse, including literary discourse (Hart, Stock-
well).
Part 3: Central topics consists of shorter chapters on specific topics that illustrate
the breadth of cognitive linguistic research. Most of these chapters deal with linguistic
phenomena that have played a major role in the development of cognitive linguistic
research. These include topics such as polysemy (Gries), semantic typology (Koptjevska-
ja-Tamm), space (Coventry), time (Evans), motion (Filipović and Ibarretxe-Antuñano),
fictive motion (Matlock and Bergmann), tense, mood and aspect (Janda), grammaticali-
zation (van der Auwera, Van Olmen and Du Mon), signed languages (Wilcox), argument
structure constructions (Casenhiser), and prototype effects in grammar (Taylor). We have
also incorporated some additional chapters on themes that are coming to the fore within
Cognitive Linguistics: individual differences (Dąbrowska), emergence (MacWhinney),
and default non-salient interpretations (Giora).
It becomes clear from this enumeration that the list is not exhaustive: there are many
more topics that currently attract a considerable amount of attention, but have not been
included for various reasons. Topics that were on our wish-list but did not materialize
were, among others, those dealing with spoken language, gesture and multimodality (but
see the handbook by Müller et al. 2014), chapters dealing with computational modelling,
with case and with linguistic relativity, and chapters focusing on cognition in cognate
areas, such as bilingual or translation cognition, to name but a few.
4. The future
The Handbook is intended to be a summary of the most important achievements of
contemporary cognitive linguistic research but also a volume that looks forward and
helps to shape the field in the years to come. For this reason, we conclude this introduc-
tion with some comments on what we think the future will bring.
tion and reflected on linguistic examples, some of which were real and some of which
had been constructed. These early analyses of important linguistic phenomena laid the
theoretical foundations for much of the discipline. Since then, Cognitive Linguistics has
undergone a significant shift towards a more empirical approach. This shift towards
empiricism was driven by two main forces.
First, it was recognized from early on (e.g., Langacker 1988) that grammars are
shaped by use, and therefore that to understand how grammars develop (in both the
historical sense and the sense of individual speakers acquiring their language(s)) we
must look at real usage. This lead to linguists working with corpora − large collections
of authentic linguistic data. Methods and tools which were already widely used in usage-
based lexicography were adopted in cognitive semantics and other areas and new
methods were developed. Nowadays, a large body of cognitive linguistic research relies
on corpus data; it distinguishes itself from traditional English corpus linguistics in that
it considers corpora as tools and corpus linguistics as a methodology, not as a theory or
discipline (Renouf 2005).
Secondly, as the body of cognitive-inspired analyses grew, we began to get competing
accounts of the same phenomena. For instance, there is an on-going debate about wheth-
er it is the main clause or the subordinate clause verb which is the most prominent
element in sentences containing a complement clause (such as I know that she left).
Langacker (1991) adopts the traditional analysis, according to which the main clause
verb is the profile determinant, pointing out that the sentence designates “the process of
knowing, not of leaving” (436). Other linguists (e.g., Thompson 2002; Verhagen 2005)
have argued that the subordinate verb should be regarded as the profile determinant,
since (in the vast majority of cases, at least in conversation) it is the subordinate clause
which constitutes the speaker’s “interactional agenda”, while the so-called “main clause”
functions merely conveys “the speaker’s epistemic, evidential or evaluative stance to-
wards the issue or claim at hand” (Thompson 2002: 134). For instance, in the following
excerpt, the main thrust of A’s contribution is to indicate that whatever is being discussed
is “cool”, and B’s and C’s contributions show that this is how they interpret A’s utterance.
Langacker (2008: 419) acknowledges this argument, and proposes that we need to distin-
guish between different kinds of prominence. But how? There is a growing awareness
that unless we develop reliable ways of measuring such differences, debates between
linguists will be reduced to assertions that one’s own intuitions are better than another
analyst’s. Cognitive linguists need to develop theories that make testable predictions,
test these predictions and use the results to revise the theory if necessary, thus completing
the empirical cycle.
Some researchers who took this step have adopted experimental methods from psy-
chology (e.g., Ambridge and Goldberg 2008; Bencini and Goldberg 2000; Boyd and
Goldberg 2011; Dąbrowska 2008, 2013; Gibbs and Colston 1995; Wheeler and Bergen
2010). While the earlier studies used mostly off-line judgement tasks, cognitive linguists
are now increasingly relying on more sophisticated techniques, including on-line reaction
time measurements and brain imaging. Many others (e.g., Arppe 2008; Divjak 2010;
Geeraerts 1994; Gries 2003; Hilpert 2008; Lemmens 1998) applied sophisticated statisti-
cal methods to corpus data. In fact, the increasing reliance on quantitative methods
(Geeraerts 2006: 17) has led some to declare that Cognitive Linguistics has taken “a
quantitative turn” (Janda 2013: 1). A third line of research aims to combine both ap-
proaches and validates corpus-based findings experimentally (for book-length treatments,
see Divjak and Gries 2012; Gries and Divjak 2012; Klavan 2012; many more studies
have appeared as journal articles).
A question which many cognitive linguists are asking themselves now is: how far do
we need to go? Do we all need to become statisticians, psychologists, neurologists?
Ideally the answer to this question may be yes, but it seems hardly feasible, and is
unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future. Instead, we can collaborate with experts
from these fields. This type of interdisciplinarity presupposes a basic knowledge and
understanding of cognate disciplines and a convergence in research methodology. It is
this type of convergence that we aim to encourage with this handbook. The empirical
trend is clearly on the increase and, it is to be hoped, will continue to gather momentum:
human language is just too complex to understand by using traditional introspective
methods (cf. Geeraerts 2010).
One way to achieve this goal more quickly would be to get linguists to archive their
data and code used for analysis publicly. Some journals, including Cognitive Linguistics,
already offer their authors the possibility to publish supplementary materials, including
data and code, online. Transparency does not guarantee integrity, but it is certainly a
step in the right direction as it makes it possible for other researchers to check, re-
analyze, or re-intepret existing data and published findings.
A recently launched initiative, TrolLing [opendata.uit.no], takes this example of good
practice to the next level by making available an independent platform for publicly
archiving data and code, free of charge, to linguists of any theoretical persuasion. Sharing
data helps with quality control at the submission and publication stage but also allows
researchers to make progress more quickly by making negative results available and by
making it possible to pool data, thus saving valuable time and resources.
4.2. Interdisciplinarity
Much of the early theorizing in cognitive linguistics was inspired by research in cogni-
tive psychology, in particular, Eleanor Rosch’s work on prototypes and basic level cat-
egories (Rosch 1973). While later work continued to draw on these findings, most cogni-
tive linguistic researchers did not engage with more recent developments in psychology.
This is evident in many of the chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
(Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007). For instance, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s (2007) ex-
cellent chapter on polysemy, prototypes, and basic level categories discusses the work
of early pioneers like Rosch and Berlin, but not more recent reappraisals (Murphy 2002),
work on exemplar theory (Nosofsky 1988, 1992), perceptual symbol systems (Barsalou
1999) or the relevant research in neuroscience (see Ramscar’s chapter for a discussion
of some of this work). Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk can hardly be blamed for this − the
chapter provides a fair summary and assessment of CL work in the last two decades of
the twentieth century − but one does feel that this work should be more strongly ground-
ed in psychological research. Likewise, Talmy’s chapter on attentional phenomena in the
same volume (Talmy 2007), while providing an extremely useful framework for analys-
ing salience in language, does not engage with psychological research on attention at
all.
Even at the time the Oxford Handbook was published, there was a considerable
amount of work which attempted to incorporate insights from more recent research in
cognitive psychology and other cognitive science disciplines − work by scholars such as
Lakoff, Levinson, Bowerman, Tomasello, Lieven, Bergen, Gibbs, and many others.
Some of this work was already discussed in it; and much more has been published since
then. Anyone will agree that in order to understand a phenomenon as complex as human
language, it is necessary to combine insights from many disciplines, and so interdisci-
plinary work will continue to gather momentum. We hope that the chapters in this hand-
book − in particular, the “foundations” chapters − will assist this process.
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Dagmar Divjak