35 years of Cognitive Linguistics
Session 1: Introduction
Martin Hilpert
What is this course about?
• It’s an introduction to Cognitive Linguistics.
• Cognitive Linguistics = the study of language in
terms of cognitive processes such as
– categorization, schematization, analogy, ...
• You will find out about
– the assumptions and goals of Cognitive Linguistics,
– its main research themes,
– how the field has developed since its inception.
Overview
What are the requirements?
• Please come to the lectures.
• There are readings for each lecture, you can
access them online.
• For each reading, there will be an online quiz
that has to be completed before the lecture.
• At the end of the class, there will be a takehome exam.
plan for today
1. What is Cognitive Linguistics?
2. three central projects in Cognitive Linguistics
– the study of conceptual metaphor
– Construction Grammar
– Usage-based linguistics
... and how they developed over the years
3. conclusions and outlook
What is Cognitive Linguistics?
• shared assumptions:
– knowledge of language is the primary object of
study
– a key aim of linguistics is to explain why some
sentences are grammatical while others are not
• In the mirror John saw himself.
• * In the mirror himself saw John.
• rejection of generative assumptions:
– children are not endowed with a ‘universal
grammar’
– the ‘grammar and dictionary’ view of linguistic
knowledge is rejected
– knowledge of language emerges from language
use
• Cognitive Linguistics
– attempts to describe what speakers know when
they know a language
• words, constructions, ...
– attempts to relate that knowledge to general
cognitive processes
• categorization, schema formation, analogy, ...
– attempts to explain how that knowledge comes
into being through language use
• Psycholinguistics:
– How does the human
mind handle language?
– language processing,
production, acquisition
– not tied to a single
theory of language
– on-line data: reaction
times, eye movements,
brain imaging, etc.
• Cognitive linguistics:
– What does language tell us
about the mind?
– language structures,
language representation
– conceived as a theory of
language
– off-line data: linguistic
examples, grammaticality
judgments, corpus data
• Psycholinguistics:
– divide and conquer
•
•
•
•
•
word recognition
parsing
sentence comprehension
anaphora resolution
...
• Cognitive linguistics:
– a theory of everything
• how language is
represented in the
mind, how it is learned
and used, how it
changes, the universe,
and all the rest
• Functional linguistics
– Basic assumption: Language is the way it is
because it is used for communication.
– Form follows function.
– ≠ formal approaches: The structures of language
are determined by formal principles that are
independent of functional pressures.
• This is the report that I filed before reading.
• * I filed the report before reading.
• Yes, cognitive linguistics is known for work on
metaphor, and meaning in general.
• But, it is much more than that!
Three central projects
1. Conceptual Metaphor
Lakoff & Johnson 1980
definition of metaphor
“The essence of metaphor is understanding one
kind of thing in terms of another.”
(Lakoff and Johnson 1980)
arguments
She attacked every weak point in my argument.
Your claims are indefensible.
You’re going to get a lot of flak for those suggestions.
They had to surrender to the force of our arguments.
• Being in an argument is viewed (and talked about)
in terms of fighting a war.
• the ‘ARGUMENT IS WAR’ metaphor
domain of WAR
Fighting parties
domain of ARGUMENTS
mappings
Participants
in an argument
Attacking
Raising objections
Defending
Maintaining
one’s opinion
Surrendering
Giving up your
opinion
source domain
target domain
diseases
• Since 1998 the virus has invaded southern and central
Europe, killing over 1.8 million animals so far.
• We are losing the fight against tuberculosis.
• He has been battling his disease with homeopathic
medication.
• The spread of the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS) is dealing a heavy blow to commercial activities in
Taiwan.
• DISEASES ARE ENEMIES
domain of WAR
Enemy / Invader
Attacking / invading
Fighting
domain of DISEASE
Germs, viruses
Infection
Trying to heal
Ammunition
Medication
Victory
Recovery
scientific disciplines
• She has published widely in the field of cognitive psychology.
• My dissertation straddles the line between linguistics and
philosophy.
• This article goes beyond the traditional boundaries of particle
physics.
• This finding has opened up entirely new areas of research.
• SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES ARE AREAS
domain of SPACE
Area
domain of SCIENCE
Discipline
Being in a
borderline region
Working on
two disciplines
Moving across
boundaries
Changing disciplines
Discovery of
new territory
Scientific
discovery
source domains and target domains
• Common source domains
–
–
–
–
–
• target domains
space (a central idea)
force (a strong candidate)
manipulation (turn this to your advantage)
vision (a clear explanation)
taste (a bitter disappointment)
• >> direct, bodily experience
importance
competition
social relations
logic
emotions
>> abstract ideas
conceptual metaphor
• is based on our capacity to think of (and then talk
about) one kind of thing in terms of another
• involves a mapping of concepts from one
semantic domain onto another domain
• helps us understand (or: “get a grip on”) complex
phenomena, unfamiliar topics, or any other less
well structured semantic domain
the ‘literal meaning first’ hypothesis
That is not true, she is a human...
He MUST mean something else…
He probably means that Sally is in some
way LIKE a block of ice,
repellant, unpleasant to interact with,
unresponsive, etc.
Sally is a block of ice.
John Searle
Does sympathy feel warm?
•
•
•
•
She gave me the cold shoulder.
We received a warm welcome.
I gradually warmed up to them.
She gave me an icy stare.
Sympathy feels warm, exclusion feels cold.
(Zhong and Leonardelli 2008)
• Two groups of subjects were asked to perform a
number of tasks, among them
– Group A had to imagine a scene of social inclusion
– Group B had to imagine a scene of social exclusion
• After all the tasks, the experimenter asked each
subject to estimate the room temperature “at
the request of lab maintenance staff”.
• Significant difference between the two groups,
exclusion group giving lower estimates.
• Target domain activates the source domain.
Exclusion feels cold, part II
(Zhong and Leonardelli 2008)
• Participants were literally subjected to social
inclusion/exclusion.
• computer game in which “three players were
connecting on-line”, tossing a ball
• Exclusion group received the ball twice initially, but
not once during the rest of the game.
• test after the task:
– Desirability ratings for cold and hot drinks and food items
• Exclusion group found hot food and drinks
significantly more desirable than the inclusion group.
Why is this important?
• Metaphorical target domains can activate their respective
source domains.
• Metaphors are not just language, they are deeply
engrained patterns of association in thought.
• Specifically: Exclusion feels cold, creates a need for
physical warmth.
• Knowledge of social interaction is hence embodied, i.e.
connected to bodily experience.
Warmth makes you feel sympathy
(Williams and Bargh 2008)
• Holding a warm cup of coffee makes you feel
more sympathy for others:
– “before the experiment”, subjects were casually
asked to hold the experimenter’s drink during an
elevator ride
– two groups: hot coffee, cold soda
– both groups were then asked to complete a
personality assessment questionnaire
– the same person was rated as more friendly,
intelligent, etc. by the coffee group
• Source domain activates the target domain.
Warmth makes you feel sympathy, part II
(Williams and Bargh 2008)
• Holding a hot therapeutic pad makes you more
generous towards others:
– subjects were asked to evaluate an icy/hot therapeutic
pad “for market research”
– two groups: hot, icy (experimenter blind)
– Both groups were offered two types of reward:
• ice cream for themselves
• ice cream “gift certificate for a friend”
– The ‘hot’ group chose gift certificates significantly
more often.
conceptual metaphor: conclusions
• The study of conceptual metaphor started on the
basis of off-line linguistic evidence:
– The deadline is getting closer and closer.
– Let us put this disagreement behind us.
• >> Abstract ideas (target domains) are understood in
terms of direct bodily experience (source domains).
• >> Abstract human thought is embodied.
• By now, a substantial body of psychological evidence
lends support to this view.
Bergen 2012
2. Construction Grammar
What do speakers know when they
know a language?
What speakers have to know:
• must know words
– dog, submarine, probably, you, should, etc.
– what they mean, how they sound
• must know that there are different kinds of words
– red is an adjective, tasty is an adjective as well, lobster is a noun, etc.
• must know how to put words together
– red can be combined with ball
– many cannot be combined with milk
– John saw Mary is ok, John Mary saw is not, but It’s John Mary saw is ok
• must be able to put the right endings on words
– John walk-s, two dog-s
• must be able to understand newly coined words
– festive-ness, under-whelm
• must know that sometimes more is meant than is said
– General Motors were able to increase production in the second quarter.
– I don’t know if that is a good idea.
• must know idiomatic expressions
– I'm all ears, let’s take a break, we really hit it off, …
The dictionary-and-grammar model
The totality of our knowledge of language is captured
by a network of constructions: a ‘construct-i-con.’
Goldberg 2003: 219
[…] the network of constructions captures our
grammatical knowledge of language in toto, i.e.
it’s constructions all the way down.
Goldberg 2006: 18
Constructions
•
•
•
•
•
words: cat, philosophy, sparkling, run, ...
collocations: I don’t know, you bet, see you, ...
semi-fixed phrases: keep V-ing, could you please VP
syntactic patterns: SUBJ BE V-ed, SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2
abstract phrase structures: PREP DET NOUN
• Speakers’ knowledge of language = an associative
network that connects all of these constructions
Idiomatic expressions are everywhere
• In winter you can look out of the window and
tell it's 2°C outside. How? Because the
crocuses are coming into bloom. Crocuses are
plants that nature has provided with a
biological thermometer. It's very accurate,
reacting to temperature differences of as little
as 0.5°C. As the weather gets warmer the
flowers open. But when the temperature
drops, they close again.
Idiomatic expressions are everywhere
• In winter you can look out of the window and
tell it's 2°C outside. How? Because the
crocuses are coming into bloom. Crocuses are
plants that nature has provided with a
biological thermometer. It's very accurate,
reacting to temperature differences of as little
as 0.5°C. As the weather gets warmer the
flowers open. But when the temperature
drops, they close again.
Idiomatic expressions are everywhere
• In winter you can look out of the window and
tell it's 2°C outside. How? Because the
crocuses are coming into bloom. Crocuses are
plants that nature has provided with a
biological thermometer. It's very accurate,
reacting to temperature differences of as little
as 0.5°C. As the weather gets warmer the
flowers open. But when the temperature
drops, they close again.
Idiomatic expressions are everywhere
• In winter you can look out of the window and
tell it's 2°C outside. How? Because the
crocuses are coming into bloom. Crocuses are
plants that nature has provided with a
biological thermometer. It's very accurate,
reacting to temperature differences of as little
as 0.5°C. As the weather gets warmer the
flowers open. But when the temperature
drops, they close again.
Idiomatic expressions are everywhere
• In winter you can look out of the window and
tell it's 2°C outside. How? Because the
crocuses are coming into bloom. Crocuses are
plants that nature has provided with a
biological thermometer. It's very accurate,
reacting to temperature differences of as little
as 0.5°C. As the weather gets warmer the
flowers open. But when the temperature
drops, they close again.
motivating Construction Grammar
• “It appears to us that the machinery needed
for describing the so-called minor or
peripheral constructions of the sort which has
occupied us here will have to be powerful
enough to be generalized to more familiar
structures, in particular those represented by
individual phrase structure rules.”
• Fillmore et al. (1988)
motivating Construction Grammar
• if it is the case that
– idiomatic expressions are all over the place,
– idiomatic expressions are more than fixed strings,
– and idiomatic expressions are highly productive,
• … then ‘the appendix to the grammar’ can in fact be
extended to comprise all patterns that exist in a given
language.
• The machinery that is necessary to account for the
‘periphery’ of grammar is powerful enough to account
for its ‘core’ as well.
• Instead of dictionary plus grammar: a construct-i-con
Goldberg 1995
argument structure
• also called valency
yawn
send
valency defined
• The set of participants is called the verb’s valency.
– devour has a valency of two (transitive)
– hand has a valency of three (ditransitive)
– exist has a valency of one (intransitive)
• The participants are called the arguments of the
verb.
traditional idea of valency
• It’s in the lexicon!
• Each verb is listed in the mental
lexicon.
• In the entry it is specifies with what
syntactic contexts the verb can
occur.
– SWEEP
•
•
•
•
intransitive
transitive
transitive plus resultant state adjective
transitive plus path
problems with lexically specified
valency
• speakers use verbs ‘creatively’, in syntactic
contexts in which they have not heard a verb
before:
– John played the piano to pieces.
– He pulled himself free, one leg at a time.
– No matter how carefully you lick a spoon clean, some
goo will cling to it.
• Are there entries such as the following?
– ‘play: acting on an object in a violent manner that
triggers a change of state in that object’
alternative explanation
• The syntactic context dictates a certain
interpretation of the verb.
• coercion
– If a lexical item is semantically incompatible with
its morphosyntactic context, the meaning of the
lexical item conforms to the meaning of the
structure in which it is embedded.
• John plays the piano.
• John plays the piano to pieces.
coercion at work
• intransitive verbs: run, sneeze, worry
• resultative uses:
– John ran his feet sore.
– Fred sneezed his cat soaking wet.
– Bob’s mother worried herself sick.
coercion at work
• David has whiffled my borogoves completely
vorpal again!
• You do not know what the words mean.
• You do know that
– David did something to the borogoves that is
called ‘whiffling’.
– As a result, the borogoves became ‘vorpal’.
How do you understand novel
denominal verbs?
• to coffee
– Don’t forget to coffee the scientists every two hours.
– Where should we coffee?
– I coffeed myself into a frenzy.
• The constructional view:
– If the lexical meaning of a word is unclear, the construction in
which it is embedded should provide a meaning via the principle
of coercion.
• The ‘common-sense’ hypothesis:
– There are lexical items in the context that evoke a specific
interpretation of the novel denominal verb.
– I coffeed myself into a frenzy >> coffee, frenzy, I did something
to myself, ...
inference task
(Kaschak & Glenberg 2000)
• Subjects see two stimuli sentences
– Stimulus sentence A
– Stimulus sentence B
• Subjects see a test sentence
– Test sentence
• Subjects match the test sentence with one of
the stimuli sentence.
– Which of the stimuli sentence allows you to infer that
the test sentence happened?
• Lyn crutched Tom the apple so he wouldn’t
starve.
• Lyn crutched the apple so Tom wouldn’t
starve.
stimulus sentences
• Lyn acted on the apple.
test sentence
• Lyn crutched Tom the apple so he wouldn’t
starve.
• Lyn crutched the apple so Tom wouldn’t
starve.
stimulus sentences
• Tom got the apple.
test sentence
inference task results
(Kaschak & Glenberg 2000)
percentage of chosen ditransitives
0
Tom got the apple, ‘throw’
Lyn acted on the apple, ‘throw’
Tom got the apple, ‘crutch’
Lyn acted on the apple, ‘crutch’
20
40
60
80
100
Construction Grammar: conclusions
• Dictionary and Grammar model:
– a large lexicon with words, a set of grammatical
rules
• CxG:
– a large, hierarchically structured inventory of
constructions, a construct-i-con
– constructions: symbolic units, everything from
words to highly abstract syntactic patterns
evidence for these assumptions
• idioms galore: ordinary language contains many
idiomatic expressions with non-compositional
meanings (by and large, all of a sudden)
• coercion effects: constructions override lexical
meanings (John played the piano to pieces.)
• idiosyncratic constraints: morphological and
syntactic patterns are subject to semantic and
pragmatic constraints (*coming into leaves)
• experimental evidence: speakers activate
constructions in sentence comprehension
Google: Hilpert YouTube grammar
Hilpert 2014
3. Usage-based Linguistics
Usage-based linguistics
• Speakers build up knowledge of language through
experience with language.
• This process does not rely on any languagespecific mechanisms, all that is needed are
domain-general cognitive skills:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
categorization
analogy
schema formation
chunking
gestalt perception
memory
...
Langacker 1987, 1991
Langacker’s project: a cognitive grammar
• All linguistic structures are meaningful (= CxG).
– subject, noun, preposition, relative clause, progressive
aspect, infinitive, past tense, finiteness, modal auxiliary, ...
• The meanings of these structures can be fully
described in cognitive terms.
to walk
the preposition into
the present progressive
a walk
the empirical turn in usage-based linguistics
• Today, usage-based linguistics is mostly
associated with empirical studies that
document how frequency of use shapes
knowledge of grammar.
Bybee 2010
highly predictable words are reduced
• I’d like a gin and tonic, please.
• I’d like a gin and a cucumber sandwich, please.
• This effect is observed not only at the level of
word strings, but also at the level of
constructions.
• Words are reduced when they occur in a
construction for which they are highly typical.
reading task
(Gahl and Garnsey 2004)
• The director suggested the scene should be filmed at
night.
• The director suggested the scene between Kim and
Mike.
• The confident engineer maintained the machinery of
the whole upper deck.
• The confident engineer maintained the machinery
would be hard to destroy.
reading task
(Gahl and Garnsey 2004)
• The director suggested the scene should be filmed at
night.
THAT-less complement clause construction
• The director suggested the scene between Kim and
Mike.
• The confident engineer maintained the machinery of
the whole upper deck.
• The confident engineer maintained the machinery would
be hard to destroy.
reading task
(Gahl and Garnsey 2004)
• The director suggested the scene should be filmed at
night.
• The director suggested the scene between Kim and
Mike.
• The confident engineer maintained the machinery of
the whole upper deck.
transitive construction
• The confident engineer maintained the machinery
would be hard to destroy.
reading task
(Gahl and Garnsey 2004)
• Constructional bias of the verb significantly
correlates with reduced pronunciation.
– argue, believe, claim, conclude, confess, or decide are
pronounced shorter when they occur with a
complement clause
– accept, advocate, confirm, or emphasize are reduced
when occurring with a direct object
• The reduction effect cannot be explained through
the routinization of word strings, the actual
words can vary, it is the structure that matters.
What is Cognitive Linguistics?
Three central projects
Trends
• In all three projects, there is a clear trend towards
empirical methods:
– corpus linguistics
– psycholinguistic experimentation
• Cognitive Linguistics aims to connect with other areas of
research within linguistics and elsewhere:
–
–
–
–
–
variationist sociolinguistics
grammaticalization research
typology
psychology (exemplar theory, embodied cognition)
computer science (fluid construction grammar)
See you next time!
martin.hilpert@unine.ch