Cognitive Linguistics: Current Applications and Future Perspectives
The various contributions: foundations, applications and future perspectives
The psychological basis
Research into the psychological basis of linguistic processing is the proper field of psycholinguistics, a vast area from which two domains are represented: metaphor processing and language acquisition. In their chapter “The contested impact of cognitive linguistic research on the psycholinguistics of metaphor understanding”, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. and Marcus Perlman discuss some of the most important criticisms of cognitive linguistic studies on metaphor. The authors argue that linguistic analyses alone are unable to determine what putative conceptual metaphors underlie the use of particular linguistic expressions and call for experimental research providing independent evidence for such structures. They question CL assumptions that (a) there should be a direct, or motivated, relationship between systematicity in language and people’s underlying cognitive functions (including their unconscious mental representations and brain structures, cf. Dodge and Lakoff 2005), and (b) that the complexity of metaphorical meanings requires equally complex cognitive processes to create or understand these meanings by ordinary language users, as in conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). According to Gibbs and Perlman, the challenge for cognitive linguistic research is to frame hypotheses in a falsifiable way, and in this respect they briefly outline a number of steps that cognitive linguists could adopt to deal with some of these problems. The authors conclude that despite its success, cognitive linguistic research will continue to be contested by scholars in different neighboring disciplines until it addresses some of its methodological weaknesses in a systematic way.
The topic, entitled “X is like Y: The emergence of similarity mappings in children’s early speech and gesture” also examines the psychological reality of basic constructs. S̡eyda Özçalıs̡kan and Susan Goldin-Meadow first discuss simple analogical mappings in terms of one of the earliest metalinguistic abilities which children master and which thus constitute the stepping-stones for the development of metaphorical thinking. The authors then present the results of research which investigated the emergence and later development of similarity mapping abilities (X is like Y) in spontaneous speech and gesture, using longitudinal observations of English-speaking children from ages 1;2 to 2;10. The results show that the children began to produce similarity mappings routinely by age 2;2, initially conveying only the source domain of the mapping in their speech and relying on nonverbal modalities (i.e., gesture and communicative context) to convey the target domain. The onset of ‘X IS LIKE Y’ constructions was furthermore preceded by the onset of gesture-speech combinations expressing similarity relations without the word like. Özçalıs̡kan and Goldin-Meadow conclude that gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development, as it both predates and serves as the supporting context for oncoming changes in speech.
