Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics

Ben Bergen

Meeting 1: Introduction

August 26, 2008

The course in a nutshell

What we're looking at this semester

1. How meaning works, especially with respect to what it tells us about the cognitive mechanisms underlying language use.
2. How the language you speak affects the rest of your cognitive system
3. How grammar works, especially the ways that it conveys meaning.
4. How language is learned.

Throughout, we'll emphasize the embodiment of language - how situations of use, individual experiences, and the cognitive system contribute to and constrain how language works.

1. Meaning

Meaning is tricky. There are a number of competing ideas about what word meaning is like.

·  Structural semantics: Words have meaning in relation to other words, e.g pig & piglet, tall & short

o    Are relations among words sufficient to account for what words actually mean to language users? What's missing?

·  Semantic features: Words have semantic properties that define their meanings, e.g.:

o     What are some words that you can't define in terms of features? What's missing?

·  Truth conditions: Words have meaning by reference to situations in the world, e.g. the meaning of 

   The cat is on the mat is the world situation where a particular cat is on a particular mat.

o      When are situations in the world not enough to capture meaning? What's missing?

·  The perspective adopted in cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, views meaning as built up from embodied experiences people have had in the world, which words evoke.

o      People act, perceive, and have emotional experiences in the real world

o      They create internal categorize of these experiences on the basis of their properties

o      Language use conjures up internal recreations of the experiences it is associated with.

o      Knowledge of language thus constitutes associations between internal representations of   

        experiences of linguistic form and linguistic meaning

2. How language affects the mind

Languages differ in a lot of ways

Their grammar

In Spanish, a key is grammatically feminine and a bridge is masculine

In German, it's the reverse

In English, there's no grammatical gender for either

What concepts they have words for

Korean distinguishes between two types of "in": one for tight fitting (like your hand in your jeans pocket) and one for loose fitting (like us in the classroom)

      English doesn't distinguish between these, calling them both "in"

What metaphors they use.

            In English, the future is ahead, and the past is behind

            Mandarin uses the same system, but also has the future being down and the past being up

These differences have measurable effects on the cognitive systems of speakers of Spanish, Korean, and English. We'll look at a number of studies showing that your language influences what you pay attention to, how you perceive the world, what you remember, and how you categorize.

·     What other differences among languages could lead to differences in how the people who speak  

               those languages think?

3. Grammar

Language is built of pairings of form and meaning - symbols or constructions. The most obvious of these are words. But it's not just words that pair form and meaning:

• Morphemes, like re-, -ish, un-, etc.

• Idioms, like words and morphemes, pair some form with some meaning, except that the form may include phonological and syntactic components.
• bite the bullet, eat crow, blow your own horn
• What are some other big, meaningful chunks of English that you have to memorize?

• Phrasal patterns, such as the English ditransitive and dative, pair some form (purely syntactic) with some meaning (like a transfer event or a motion event).
• throw the books to the floor vs. ?throw the floor the books
• What are some other sentence patterns, and what meanings do they convey?

4. Language learning

The last section in the course focuses on language learning – how children with no knowledge of English or Korean or Spanish become proficient, native adult speakers.

There are two main mechanisms that learners use, and we'll consider both.

Memorization: Learners quickly and easily memorize chunks of language, from words to multi-word expressions. Among these are the grammatical structures from section 2.

·     If a child starts producing words at age 1 and knows 15,000 by age 13, how many does she have to learn per day during that time?

Generalization: They observe similarities and difference among this specific, memorized knowledge and construct more general, schematic linguistic knowledge.

·     For instance, a child might learn to say "give it", "take it" and "want it", and generalize these to a broader "Verb it" construction.

·     What sorts of generalizations do children make outside of language? (In other words, what other sorts of cognitive development is this mechanism used for?)