Evans Vyvyan. Cognitive Linguistics

Draft June 2012 for Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science. — 25 p.Cognitive Linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought and practice, concerned with investigating the relationship between human language, the mind and sociophysical (embodied) experience. It originated in scholarship which emerged in the 1970s, conducted by a small number of researchers. These include Charles Fillmore (e.g., 1975, 1978), George Lakoff (e.g., 1977; Lakoff & Thompson 1975), Ronald Langacker (e.g., 1978) and Leonard Talmy (e.g., 1975, 1978). This research effort was characterized by a rejection of the rationalist zeitgeist in linguistics that held that language is innate (Chomsky 1965), and represents an encapsulated module of mind (Chomsky 1981; Fodor 1983).