Cognitive Linguistics - Meaning, Language, Cognition (G Fauconnier)文档精选.pdfVIP

Fauconnier: Meaning, Language, Cognition Gilles Fauconnier Introduction to Methods and Generalizations To appear. Methods and Generalizations. In T. Janssen and G. Redeker (Eds). Scope and Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter. Cognitive Linguistics Research Series. I. MEANING, LANGUAGE, COGNITION Linguists agree on one thing - that language is diabolically hard to study. They do not always agree, however, on the hows, the whys, and the what fors: how one should go about studying it and how speakers manage to do what they do; why it is so hard and why exactly we bother to study it; what language is for, and what linguistics is for. A mainstream view that has been popular in the last thirty years (but not necessarily before that) offers the following answers. How linguists do it: they collect grammaticality judgments from natives and concurrently build and check hypotheses about the formal structure of particular languages and languages in general. How humans do it: they come equipped biologically with innate language-specific universals, that require only minimal fine- tuning when exposed to a particular specimen. Why its hard: easy for the child who has the innate universals already set up, hard for the linguist lost in a forest of idiosyncrasies that hide the deeper principles. Why bother? So that we can discover such principles. What is language for? The story here is that this question is not a priority for the scientist. We can worry later about function, communication, and meaning generally. And what is linguistics for? Well, there is the platonic reward of discovering structure for the sake of structure itself. And then there is biology: Since the universals are in the brain, they must also be in the genes; linguistics is theoretical biology; geneticists and neuroscientists will fill in the messy details of its implementation in our bodies. This strange and simple story contains its own methods and general