COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND AUTONOMOUS LINGUISTICS

Taylor introduces his article by claiming that Cognitive Linguistics literature's

contribution are polemic, since they are portrated against the base of other
linguistics theories.
The polemics' object is framed by a cluster of trends named "autonomous
linguistics"
Actually, the fact is that Cognitive Linguistics declares itself against
"autonomous linguistics" is due to the believe that language is embedded in
more general cognitive abilities.
The rejection of autonomy often takes the form of more specific claims. These
are that syntactic and morphological patterning is inherently meaningful, that
syntax, morphology, and lexicon form a continuum, and that semantics is
inherently encyclopedic in scope.
In this article, Taylor explores those aspects:
1- He explores the terms of the polemics which have been so prominent in
much Cognitive Linguistics work.
2. He explains the polemic nature of the Cognitive Linguistics literature.
3. The circumstances in which Cognitive Linguistics emerged in 1980s as selfconscious theoretical movement.
4. The author reviews the theoretical and methodological issues which
characterize autonomous linguistics.
5. Cognitive Linguistic's reaction to these issues.
6. He adresses the concept of autonomy and argues that the defining
characteristic of Cognitive Linguistic may lie, not so much in its rejection of
autonomy, but in its commitment to a symbolic view of language.

2. POLEMICAL ASPECTS OF COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS

The author portraits the underlying polemical nature of the Cognitive Linguistics
through the editorial statement of the journal Cognitive Linguistics ( Geeraerts
1990) :
"Language is considered not to be isolated from the other faculties of man"
" The formal structures of language are studied not as if they were autonomous"
Secondly, the journal also claims that :
" there is an emphasis on the conceptual and experiential basis of semantics"

- Second, Cognitive Linguistics stands opposed to those theories "which treat

grammatical constructions as meaningless"

Followingly, Taylor exposes the polemic seen through two Cognitive Linguistics:
Langacker and Lakoff.
Langacker offers Cognitive Grammar so as to replace the Generative one.
Some of the points that the so-mentioned author made was the rule/list fallacy
(Langacker 1987: 42). According to him, it is fallacious to assume that what can
be accounted for by rue needs to be separately listed. Instead, his postion is
that general statements (rules) and particular statements (lists) "can perfectly
well coexist in the cognitive representation of linguistic phenomena.
In the case of Lakoff, the gulf separating Cognitive Linguistics and Generative
Linguistics is profound and relates to the "primary commitments" which is "to
view language in terms of systems of combinatorial mathematics" (Lakoff 1990:
43). For Cognitive Linguistics, the primary commitment is "to make one's
account of human language accord with what is generally known about the
mind and the brain, from other disciplines as well as our own" (40). According to
Lakoff, these primary commitments not only lead to different analyses of data;
they also determine the kinds of data that are brought under investigation and
may even lead to different understandings of what linguistic is.

3. SOME HISTORY
In the third section, Taylor provides the reader an outline of linguistic's
development trajectory, from its beginnings until the present days.
Firstly, in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the usa, linguistic was
dominated above all by descriptive grammar, being Bloomfield the major text
book. That is, linguistics were focused on accumulating data from several
languages so as to analyze it. It was in 1957 when a great shift happened in
this science after the publication of Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957). The
author claimed that the aim of this science was not the corpus but the system
of rules which a native speaker was able to produced. In short time, there
appeared many types of tests (cf. tests diagnosing complements as opposed to
adjuncts, tests for confirming the status of a nominal as clausal subject among
others) whose goal were to verify the grammaticality of a sentence. In 1965, it
came another determining contribution by Chomsky with the publication of

Aspects of Theory of Syntax. This brought out the cognitive state of a speaker
as well as the innateness of language. Therefore, as Taylor points out this
change signaled the emergence of linguistics as a cognitive science. As a
consequence, nowadays the vast majority of today's linguistics take into
consideration those descriptive tools acquired from Bloomfields as well as
Chomsky's beliefs and methodologies.

4. CHARACTERISTICS OF MAINSTREAM GENERATIVE

LINGUISTICS
In the fourth section, the author reviews the main characteristics of mainstream
generative linguistics. This linguistic theory is well-known by the centrality of
syntax. This theory is unquestionably syntacticocentric. That is to say, syntax
commands over phonological and semantic symbols. Likewise, Generative
Linguistic brings out formalism, since it centres on the general categories and
conditions under which the language applies. Grammaticality is chief in this
theory . Thus, Chomskyan linguistics give priority to the well-formedness of a
sentence rather than to the speaker's grammaticality judgment. Abstractness is
another key feature, since this theoretical approach is full of covert nouns (cf.
traces, empty categories, tree structures and the c-command relation).
Modularity, as Taylor mentions syntactic component is regarded as a module
which functions independently of phonology, semantics and other cognitive
capacities such as perception an categorization, memory and learning.
Neglect of Semantics. Due to the fact that Generative Grammar is
syntacticocentric, by logic it disregards those semantic features of language.
The Core and the Periphery means that this theoretical approach centres
attention to the "core" features of a given language. Thus, we find in it recurring
topics such as Wh-movement, extraction, raising and so on.
Universal Grammar and Language Acquisition. Given that it is unlikely that
syntactic rules could be learn through exposure to linguistic data, it is believe
that the syntactic component is genetically inherited.

5. THE COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS REACTION

Due to the disagreement of many linguistics to Chomskyan approaches, in the
early 1970s, there were born other linguistic models such as Lexical-Functional
Grammar (Bresnan 1978), Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar et
al. 1985) and Word Grammar (Hudson 1984). Likewise, at that time, Cognitive
Linguistics, another approach which differed with Autonomous linguistics was in
development.

Its main claim was that linguistic knowledge is a cognitive

phenomenon, thus the neuronal structure of the brain was taken into
consideration (cf. Lamb). They verified that cognitive abilities were essential in
the linguistic investigation. For instance, many general cognitive abilities, known
as "construal operations" proved the fact that " linguistic expressions do not,
and cannot, designate a state of affairs as it "objectively" is; rather, the scene
must be processed and conceptualized by the human mind.
The feature that differentiates Cognitive Linguistics from other approaches in
counteraction to the Chomskyan ones is the symbolic view of language ( Noble
and Davidson 1996; Deacon 1997). Actually, symbolic thought is proved to be
supported by human cognitive abilities such as empathy (Lieberman 1991) and
joint attention ( Tomasello 1999).
Finally, according to John R. Taylor, another distinction is that Langacker's
Cognitive Grammar is divided on three objects of study: phonological
representations, semantic representations and symbolic relations between
phonological and semantic representations.

5.1 Methodological Consequences

The Cognitive Linguistics research program has been influenced by a
commitment to a symbolic view of language and attempts to ground it in more
general cognitive abilities.
Cognitive linguistics has focused on the theoretical uninteresting periphery.
There have been many studies on the properties of individual lexical items such
as prepositions, the quirky grammatical constructions (Tuggy 1996), on the
double -be construction and Lambrecht (1990).
The lack of enthusiasm for mathematical formalism has been replaced by the
search
Another contribution that the Cognitive approach made to Linguistic were the
conceptual motivations for syntactic and morphological structures.
Besides the large body of literature which has adressed the functional and
conceptual basis of the major word classes (Givn 1984; Wierzbicka 1986;
Langacker 1987; Taylor 1996), a more radical view was offered by Croft (1999,
2001) who stated that constructions are basic and that word classes are
epiphenomenal, since they need to be defined in terms of the constructions in
which they are eligible to occur.
The notion of subject has also come in for intense scrutiny by Langacker (1993,
1999), recognizing that the identification of " subject" with the semantic role
"Agent"

is

bound

to

be

inadequate,

he

proposes highly

schematic

characterization in terms of the "primary figure" at the clausal level. Especially

challenging for this approach are so-called expletive subjects, as in It seems
that a mistake has been made and There seems to have been a mistake. From
the symbolic point of view of language, the expletive subjects have semantic
content, as they are able to function as the primary figure.
The analysis of the English passive by Langacker (1982) was the earliest
developed presentation of Cognitive Grammar.

He examined each of the

constituents of a passive clause ( cf. the verb to be, the participle, the optional
by-phrase) so as to identify their function in the passive sentence in relation to

the values that these elements display elsewhere in language. As a

consequence, he discovered that the passive be has a unique value to the
passive. The passive is not a simple transformation of an active sentence,
5.2 Acquisition
In this section the author exposes the main differences of language acquisition
from the generative perspective and from the Cognitive one. Cognitive
Linguistics suggests a different view on language acquisition. Language is only
a human ability which is genetically inherited. Actually, language is a cognitive
ability emerged from symbolic thought rather than on innate algebraic syntax.
Cognitive linguistics has also pay attention to the acquisition of constructions
(Tomasello 2000) . In contrast to the generative view which states that the
acquisition of a structural configuration is only complete after the settlement of
Universal Grammar's parameters, according to Tomasello and Brooks 1998,
that constructions are gradually acquired on a word-by-word basis.
As Tomasello's discovery has proved is that young childs' language consists of
a collage of previously utterances.