Universals and variation in language, thought and experience
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C2P54
2025-12-01
52
Universals and variation in language, thought and experience
The cognitive linguistics enterprise is characterised by two commitments: (1) the ‘Generalisation Commitment’– a commitment to the characterisation of general principles that are responsible for all aspects of human language; and (2) the ‘Cognitive Commitment’– a commitment to providing a characterisation of general principles for language that accords with what is known about the mind and brain from other disciplines (Lakoff 1990). An important consequence of this approach is the position that language does not result from an encapsulated ‘module’ of specialised knowledge, separable from general cognition (in contrast with the view developed in formal approaches to linguistics), but instead that language reflects and is informed by non-linguistic aspects of cognition. In particular, given the premise that the principles that inform language reflect general cognitive principles, the language system itself can be seen as a window that enables the direct investigation of conceptual structure (knowledge representation, including the structure and organisation of concepts) and conceptualisation (the process of meaning construction).
Although cognitive linguists have often been concerned with investigating the general cognitive principles (common to all humans) that govern language, it does not follow from this that all languages are the same, either in terms of grammatical structure or semantic structure. In this chapter, we review some influential cognitively oriented studies that demonstrate that languages can exhibit radically different conceptual organisation and structure. It seems that common cognitive principles do not give rise to uniform linguistic organisation and structure. On the contrary, cross-linguistic variation is widespread. At the same time, the existence of certain common patterns across languages is a matter of empirical fact. These common patterns are known as linguistic universals.For cognitive linguists, these commonalities are explained by the existence of general cognitive principles shared by all humans, in addition to the fundamentally similar experiences of the world also shared by all humans due to embodiment. Nevertheless, given the premise that language reflects cognitive organisation, the existence of cross-linguistic variation entails that speakers of different languages have different underlying conceptual systems. This view has implications for the thesis of linguistic relativity or linguistic determinism– the view that the language you speak affects or determines how you see the world, most famously expounded in the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s and 1940s. Hence, once we have developed the cognitive linguistics approach to linguistic universals and cross-linguistic variation as we see it, we will re-examine the Whorfian linguistic relativity principle.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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