Volume 27, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Cognitive Linguistics: Looking Back, Looking Forward, Guest Editors: Dagmar Divjak, Natalia Levshina, and Jane Klavan

Since its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.

Although Cognitive Linguistics represents a recontextualization with respect to prior tradition, internally it has been diverse and grounded from the outset. In design and principle, this holds for Cognitive Grammar, which seeks a comprehensive yet unified account of structure and use. It foreshadowed the “social turn” by claiming that the speaker-hearer interaction is inherent in linguistic units, which are abstracted from usage events; and also the “quantitative turn”, by its usage-based nature and the view that structure resides in processing activity. There is no single way of describing a language, just as there is no single way of describing a biological organism. Linguistics is thus a vast, multifaceted enterprise embracing a wide range of objectives, methods, and expertise. A number of points are made in this regard. (i) While corpus analysis is essential for many purposes, elicited and introspective data also have their place. (ii) With no inconsistency, language is validly characterized as both a cognitive/mental phenomenon and a social/interactive one. (iii) The fact that language resides in processing activity does not entail the absence of discreteness or the non-existence of complex structures. (iv) The importance of quantitative methods does not obviate the central role of structural analysis and description, which have equal claim to being empirical.

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided.

This paper argues that neurolinguistics has the potential to yield insights that can feed back into corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics. It starts by discussing how far the cognitive realism of probabilistic statements derived from corpus data currently goes. Against this background, it argues that the cognitive realism of usage-based models could be further enhanced through deeper engagement with neurolinguistics, but also highlights a number of common misconceptions about what neurolinguistics can and cannot do for linguistic theorizing.

Over the past 10 years, Cognitive Linguistics has taken a quantitative turn. Yet, concerns have been raised that this preoccupation with quantification and modelling may not bring us any closer to understanding how language works. We show that this objection is unfounded, especially if we rely on modelling techniques based on biologically and psychologically plausible learning algorithms. These make it possible to take a quantitative approach, while generating and testing specific hypotheses that will advance our understanding of how knowledge of language emerges from exposure to usage.

Cognitive Linguistics should complement the Cognitive Commitment with a Sociosemiotic Commitment: a commitment to make one’s account of human language accord with the status of language as a social semiotic, i. e., as an intersubjective, historically and socially variable tool, and to base that account on a methodology that likewise transcends the individual. By looking at defining features of Cognitive Linguistics (its cognitive orientation, and its usage-based character), it is argued that the relevance of the Sociosemiotic Commitment derives from the very essence of Cognitive Linguistics.

I will argue that the cognitive-linguistic enterprise should step up its efforts to embrace the social and pragmatic dimensions of language. This claim will be derived from a survey of the premises and promise of the cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of language and be defended in more detail on logical and empirical grounds. Key elements of a usage-based emergentist socio-cognitive approach known as Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2014, 2015) will be presented in order to demonstrate how social and pragmatic aspects can be integrated and operationalized in a cognitive-linguistic framework.

Cognitive Linguistics began as an apotheosis of lived experience, but has over the years diversified into many different stands, interpreting the notion of “experience” and along with it the notion of “cognition” in conflicting ways: individual or social, prelinguistic or linguistic, unconscious or conscious? These issues are not only philosophical as they hold crucial implications for methodology. Here, I propose that most of them can be resolved with the help of phenomenology , “the study of human experience and of the ways things present themselves to us in and through such experience” (Sokolowski 2000. Introduction to phenomenology . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2). Cogent syntheses are proposed to the individual/social and prelinguistic/linguistic debates, showing that scholars like Langacker, Talmy and Itkonen have focused on complementary aspects of implicitly phenomenological investigations. Third-person, “objective” methods are necessary for extending the scope of such investigations, but epistemologically secondary. Thus, the focus of Cognitive Linguistics can be brought back to experience, albeit in a more mature manner than 30 years ago.

On the basis of a case study of the so-called jer shift in Slavic, I argue that the Cognitive Commitment is essential for an adequate analysis of language change. While the “social turn” and the “quantitative turn” open up important perspectives and provide new opportunities for cognitive historical linguistics, the Cognitive Commitment remains essential because it facilitates elegant and insightful analyses and paves the way for more general hypotheses about language change. The jer shift is a prosodic change that originated in Late Common Slavic and spread to Old East Slavic in the twelfth century. This sound change involved the lax vowels /ĭ, ŭ/ (often referred to as jers or yers ), which either disappeared or merged with /e, o/ depending on the prosodic environment. Contrary to traditional practice, I argue that the jer shift should be analyzed in terms of trochaic feet, i. e., rhythmic groups of two syllables, where the leftmost syllable is prominent. This account is psychologically realistic, as dictated by the Cognitive Commitment, since rhythmic grouping is a fundamental property of human cognition (Nathan 2015. Phonology. In Ewa Dąbrowska & Dagmar Divjak (eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics , 253–273. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton and Ding et al. 2016. Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech. Nature Neuroscience 19. 158–164). While the Cognitive Commitment is essential for historical linguistics, one important limitation deserves mention. Historical changes such as the jer shift can be represented as “sound laws”, i. e., statements that summarize changes that span over many generations. Such statements are not about processes in the minds of individual speakers or speech communities at any point in time. They are therefore not directly relevant for the Cognitive Commitment, but are nevertheless among the most valuable tools historical linguists have at their disposal.

The relationship between typology and Cognitive Linguistics was first posed in the 1980s, in terms of the relationship between Greenbergian universals and the knowledge of the individual speaker. An answer to this question emerges from understanding the role of linguistic variation in language, from occasions of language use to typological diversity. This in turn requires the contribution of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary historical linguistics as well as typology and Cognitive Linguistics. While Cognitive Linguistics is part of this enterprise, a theory of language that integrates all of these approaches is necessary.

The fields of Cognitive Linguistics and gesture studies have begun to find each other of great interest in recent years. The cross-recognition is making for a healthy relationship because it is not a simple “mutual admiration society”, but a relation in which recognition of the other involves change and development on the part of each. Taking the usage-based tenet of Cognitive Linguistics seriously in light of video-recorded data of talk raises questions about the very object of study in Cognitive Linguistics, what its nature is, and what its scope is. The still nascient modern field of gesture studies calls for empirical research tied to the real life contexts of gesture use in order to gain a more complete picture of the phenomena “at hand”. Discussion of the place of studying multimodal communication within Cognitive Linguistics leads to consideration of broader political, economic, and sociological factors in academia which can play a role in determining the future of the field.