120224 SE MA Seminar - Focus: Functional and Cognitive Linguistics / Linguistics Seminar (2018S)

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with the basic principles of Cognitive Linguistics, as well as with some of the most important cognitive models and approaches, so that they can apply one of these models to (certain areas of) the English language.

Cognitive Linguistics was developed during the 1970s and 80s by a group of linguists who were dissatisfied with the then prevailing generative enterprise and now forms one of the main paradigms in linguistics, with adherents from all of the world and from many different of backgrounds (functional and descriptive linguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, discourse studies, etc.). It offers an innovative approach to the study of language and mind, seeking to formulate the cognitive principles that motivate the structure of language. Although over the years a number of different cognitively-based approaches and models have been developed, they all shared the following basic assumptions.

In this course we will:
(i) Discuss of a number of influential papers to trace the origin and development of the cognitive approach to language description and to become familiar with its underlying principles and the most important basic concepts and terminology.
(ii) Discuss a number of topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual structure and organization, the relationship between language and thought, the experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-use, the issue of embodiment, figurative language (metaphor and metonymy), prototypicality and systematic polysemy
(iii) Apply the theory of Cognitive Grammar (as developed by Ronald Langacker) to some core areas of the English language.