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The Pros And Cons Of Cognitive Linguistics

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Cognitive Linguistics is a new approach to the study of language which views linguistic knowledge as part of general cognition and thinking. It emerged through the work of George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker and considers that linguistic behavior is not separated from other general cognitive abilities which allow mental processes of reasoning or memory but understood as an integral part of it. According to Lakoff and Johnson, there is a conceptual potential that enables the transferring of the knowledge and experience human beings have of the things and events that they know well, to those other objects and events with which they may not be so familiar with, and even to abstract concepts. (Johnson)One of the main theoretical principles of cognitive …show more content…

There are certain approaches that focus on the text, like the formalist and structuralist ones, others focus on the writer like the biographical or psychological ones. Each of these approaches has their own positive and negative aspects. A cognitive linguistic approach to literature reconciles both the above mentioned theories and takes into consideration a third aspect: the reader. Literary experience becomes thus the result of the conceptualization of all the conceptual aspects of human experience and behavior. A cognitive approach to literature rests on three key principles from cognitive science: the notion that meaning is embodied, the notion that categorization is a feature of prototype effects, so that categories are also socio culturally grounded in embodiment, and the notion that language and its manifestations in interpretation is a natural human trait. (Stockwell) Recent work in cognitive linguistics explores the analogical processes by which the human brain makes sense of its world. So the way authors think is the way we think. Claiborne Rice states that “textual production and reception necessarily rely on identical, or even similar, integration networks” (Rice) Joseph Grady asserts that speakers and hearers share the same cognitive network structures. (Grady) According to Fauconnier and Turner, the same structures are at work in both production and reception. (Fauconnier) Under these views we understand that the human mind thinks analogically. The components of analogy include cognitive mapping skills that create levels of identification between across different domains and mental spaces. In order to understand what literary critics do when analyzing a literary text, we need to identify the kinds of cognitive mappings they

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