P R I J A V A
Students attending this course will be encouraged to discover and re-discover the nature of language and its relation to various aspects of cognition and hypothesize the relevance of this relationship for various fields of science and everyday life.
Being a sophisticated and complex phenomenon, language offers numerous insights into how our mind works, i.e. how language relates to thought. The aim of this course is to introduce the fundamental notions related to human conceptual organization and discuss evidence supporting the idea that language communicates with other cognitive processes . If this is so, the language we speak represents a source of information about the nature of our mental imagery and cognitive processes such as attention, judgment and categorization, perspective, etc. Furthermore, the interrelation between language and our perceptual and conceptual knowledge opens up possibilities to investigate how human interaction with the world and our specific sensory experience affects the nature of language. This, in turn, allows linguists, psychologists, educationalists, special needs educationalists and speech therapists, first and second language researchers, philosophers, computer scientists, i.e. cognitive scientists from various disciplines as well as other scientists, to use language as a “diagnostic” tool to determine both highly individual and largely universal phenomena pertaining to the way we perceive, process and understand, store and use our knowledge. For example: the language children speak tells us a great deal about how their perceptual and conceptual categories are formed; various elements in the language of the congenitally blind are likely to be very informative about their mental imagery and the role of alternate sensory input they experience; what we attend to in the process of learning something new tells us a great deal about what we already know and how our domains of knowledge relate to each other, etc.
Within this framework, the course will consist of three parts. In the first part of the course we will deal with the overall theoretical background (see the list of selected reading). Following this, we will deal with four more specific topics: a) language and conceptualization, b) language and sensory experience, c) language acquisition and language learning, and d) language and creativity. In the third part of the course we will discuss the above mentioned topics in relation to students’ individual interests and their ideas for micro-projects. Each part of the course will be based on a reading assignment and a class discussion.
Selected reading:

1.
Croft, W. and Wood, E. J. (2000). Construal operations in linguistics and artificial intelligence. In:
Albertazzi, L. (ed.), Meaning and Cognition, A multidisciplinary approach. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
2.
Croft, W. and Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (selected chapters).
3.
Ellis, N. C. (2003). Constructions, Chunking, and Connectionism: The Emergence of Second Language
Structure. In: Doughty, C. and Long, M. (eds.), The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition.
Malden/Oxford/Melbourne/Berlin: Blackwell Publishing.
4.
Geld, R. and Đurđek, S. (2009). Gradience in L2 procesing: the importance of the non-protoypical. In: Brdar,
M., Omazić, M. and Pavičić-Takač V. (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to English: Some Fundamental
Interdisciplinary and Applied Aspects, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
5.
Geld, R. and Šimunić, M. (2009).
A case study of a blind speaker of English as L2 . In: Brdar, M.,Omazić,
M., Pavičić Takač, V. (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to English: Fundamental, Methodological,
Interdisciplinary an Applied Aspects.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
6.
Langacker, R. W. (1999). Grammar and Conceptualization . Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter,
(selected chapters).
7.
Parrill, F., Tobin, V., and Turner, M. (eds.) (2010). Meaning, Form, and Body. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (selected chapters).
At the end of this course, at a general level, the students will be able to:
find relevant literature and read it critically;
analyze and synthesize various data;
participate in discussions argumentatively and open-mindedly;
appreciate and accept criticism and other people’s opinions;
initiate, design and conduct a small-scale research.
At a more specific level, the students will be able to:
consolidate their prior linguistic and general knowledge with new insights about the nature of language and human conceptualization;
consolidate their prior linguistic and general knowledge with new insights about the interrelation between language and other cognitive processes;
apply theoretical knowledge about the nature of language and cognition to their own areas of interest;
recognize the relevance of certain interrelations between language and cognition for various scientific disciplines and fields of life.