Cognitive linguistics in the context of "Joan Bybee"

Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple things and processes in the world differently (different cultures), not necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world and the real world (wrong beliefs).

In functional-cognitive linguistics, as well as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity or analogy between the form of a sign (linguistic or otherwise) and its meaning, as opposed to arbitrariness (which is typically assumed in structuralist, formalist and generative approaches to linguistics). The principle of iconicity is also shared by the approach of linguistic typology.

Evolutionary linguistics or Darwinian linguistics is a sociobiological approach to the study of language. Evolutionary linguists consider linguistics as a subfield of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. The approach is also closely linked with evolutionary anthropology, cognitive linguistics and biolinguistics. Studying languages as the products of nature, it is interested in the biological origin and development of language. Evolutionary linguistics is contrasted with humanistic approaches, especially structural linguistics.

A main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: there are no archaeological traces of early human language. Computational biological modelling and clinical research with artificial languages have been employed to fill in gaps of knowledge. Although biology is understood to shape the brain, which processes language, there is no clear link between biology and specific human language structures or linguistic universals.

In linguistics, a grammatical construction is any syntactic string of words ranging from sentences over phrasal structures to certain complex lexemes, such as phrasal verbs.

Grammatical constructions form the primary unit of study in construction grammar theories. In construction grammar, cognitive grammar, and cognitive linguistics, a grammatical construction is a syntactic template that is paired with conventionalized semantic and pragmatic content. In generative frameworks, constructions are generally treated as epiphenomenal, being derived by the general syntactic rules of the language in question.

Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right. The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995.

The theory takes its name from the principle that "every utterance conveys the information that it is relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee's effort to process it", that is, if I say something to you, you can safely assume that I believe that the conveyed information is worth your effort to listen to and comprehend it; and also that it is "the most relevant one compatible with the communicator's abilities and preferences", that is, I tried to make the utterance as easy to understand as possible, given its information content and my communicative skills.

Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and was, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics).

Jackendoff's research deals with the semantics of natural language, its bearing on the formal structure of cognition, and its lexical and syntactic expression. He has conducted extensive research on the relationship between conscious awareness and the computational theory of mind, on syntactic theory, and, with Fred Lerdahl, on musical cognition, culminating in their generative theory of tonal music. His theory of conceptual semantics developed into a comprehensive theory on the foundations of language, which indeed is the title of a monograph (2002): Foundations of Language. Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. In his 1983 Semantics and Cognition, he was one of the first linguists to integrate the visual faculty into his account of meaning and human language.

Frame semantics is a theory of linguistic meaning developed by Charles J. Fillmore that extends his earlier case grammar. It relates linguistic semantics to encyclopedic knowledge. The basic idea is that one cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. For example, one would not be able to understand the word "sell" without knowing anything about the situation of commercial transfer, which also involves, among other things, a seller, a buyer, goods, money, the relation between the money and the goods, the relations between the seller and the goods and the money, the relation between the buyer and the goods and the money and so on. Thus, a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept to which it refers (or highlights, in frame semantic terminology).

The idea of the encyclopedic organisation of knowledge itself is old and was discussed by Age of Enlightenment philosophers such as Denis Diderot and Giambattista Vico. Fillmore and other evolutionary and cognitive linguists like John Haiman and Adele Goldberg, however, make an argument against generative grammar and truth-conditional semantics. As is elementary for Lakoffian–Langackerian Cognitive Linguistics, it is claimed that knowledge of language is no different from other types of knowledge; therefore there is no grammar in the traditional sense, and language is not an independent cognitive function. Instead, the spreading and survival of linguistic units is directly comparable to that of other types of units of cultural evolution, like in memetics and other cultural replicator theories.

Usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics (and in particular in formalism-generativism), on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels (phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, pragmatics and semantics). Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.

The term usage-based was coined by Ronald Langacker in 1987. Usage-based models of language have become a significant new trend in linguistics since the early 2000s. Influential proponents of usage-based linguistics include Michael Tomasello, Joan Bybee and Morten Christiansen.

In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the price of peace is rising") or the understanding of time in terms of money (e.g. "I spent time at work today").

A conceptual domain can be any mental organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, often perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. This theory gained wide attention in the 1990s and early 2000s, although some researchers question its empirical accuracy.