Comps List Main Menu Turkish Literature and History Theory Exam Arabic Literature and Language Ideology

Language, usage and cognition

19278

Citation

 

Contents

Author

Context

linguistics and philosophy have tended to analyze language without reference to usage and experience. Chomsky’ (competence and performance) and Saussure’s  (langue and parole) 

Thesis

grammar is as an emergent system consisting of fluid categories and dynamic constraints that are in principle always changing under the influence of general cognitive and communicative pressures of language use. grammar consists of emergent form-function units, or ‘fluid constructions’ (Goldberg 2006), which are related to each other by probabilistic links that are determined by their similarity and cooccurrence in usage. Since constructions involve the same cross-modal associations of form and meaning as words and morphemes, they are subject to the same cognitive processes as lexical expressions. Domain-general processes are cognitive mechanisms that are relevant not only for language but also for other cognitive phenomena such as vision and thought.

Methodology

Key Terms

rich memory (Ch. 2),
chunking (Ch. 3),
analogy (Ch. 4),
categorization

Criticisms and Questions

Notes