Evans Vyvyan. Cognitive Linguistics

Draft December 2007. To appear in The Encyclopedia of Pragmatics, ed. by Louise Cummings. To be published by Routledge. — 14 p.Cognitive linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought and practise which is concerned with the relationship between human language, the mind and socio-physical experience. It emerged in the 1970s arising from rejection of the then dominant formal approaches to language in linguistics and philosophy. While its origins were, in part, philosophical in nature, cognitive linguistics has always been strongly influenced by theories and findings from other cognitive science disciplines, particularly cognitive psychology.