DAFINA GENOV A
IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS AND OTHER
MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS
This paper provides arguments for and against cognitive linguistics as an emergent
paradigm in the theory of language. Idealized cognitive models, postulated by some
proponents of cognitive linguistics, are compared to other mental representations
such as prototypes, archetypes and stereotypes. The old controversy for realism or
cognitivism in science, respectively in linguistics, is again brought to the fore . The
author is in favor of a dualistic approach to the study of language, since reference
and conceptualization presuppose each other - in order to refer, we have to
conceptualize, and we cannot conceptualize, unless we refer.
The two fundamental questions that any theory of language has to explain are:
"How does language relate to the world?" and "How does language relate to the
mind?" The answers to these questions are not easy because they are dependent on
how philosophers and psychologists answer another fundamental question: "How
does the mind relate to the world?" According to the analytical school in
philosophy, words relate to objects in the world; we can have beliefs and desires
about things in the world and the propositions that sentences express can be true or
false. The cognitive approach to language focuses on how the mind conceptualizes
our experiences of the world as a result of its cognitive abilities, making use of
psychological notions such as gestalt, figure and ground, frame, attention, salience,
etc.
The adherents of analytical philosophy seem to assign a greater role to language
and more specifically to a theory of meaning or semantics than the proponents of
cognitive linguistics. Analytical philosophers believe that it is only by the analysis
of language that we can analyze thought:
Thoughts differ from all else that is said to be among the contents of the mind in being
wholly communicable: it is the essence of thought that 1 can convey to you, the very
thought 1 have, as opposed to being able to tell you merely something about what my
thought is like. It is of the essence of thought, not merely to be communicable, but to be
communicable, without residue, by means of language. In order to understand thought,
it is necessary therefore, to comprehend the means by which thought is expressed
(Dummett ,Analytical, 195).
Studying the semantics of natural language will help, analytical philosophers
believe, to answer philosophical questions about the reality represented in thought,
philosophical questions about reference and truth, for it is through language that we
express the general and the particular, what is true or false and what is an assertion,
129
Dimitri Ginev (ed.) , Bulgarian Studies in the Philosophy ofScience, 129-140.
© 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
130 DAFINA GENOV A
a question or a command. Language serves many purposes. It is used to express a
logical truth, a deduction as in (1):
( 1) All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
an analytical truth, as in (2):
(2) Bachelors are unmarried.
and a synthetic or a contingent truth, as in (3):
(3) The car is red.
We use language, among other things, to describe a state of affairs in the world, to
express a mental state, to perform a linguistic act or to speak about its own aspects
when we use it as metalanguage.
Semantics as a component of natural language is important to philosophers
because it is meaning or intension that picks out a referent in the world (excluding
indexical expressions). The philosophical approach is focused on thought; the
cognitive one on the way concepts form hierarchies, clusters and configurations and
the impact of the latter on the structure and organization of language. According to
the philosophical approach, language is regarded not only as a means of expressing
thought, but also as a topic that deserves attention in its own right, which is not the
case with the cognitive approach. Sentences of natural language are seen as a
function of the meaning of the words used and the rules of syntax. They are the
result of the principle of compositionality, bigger units consist of smaller units. In
more abstract terms, following Frege, a sentence is the result of the completion of a
predicate expression, e.g., ( ) is writing. When we complete it, we get the sentence
P eter is writing. Reference and predication (Searle, Speech) illustrate, in yet another
way, the same principle. We use linguistic expressions to refer and to predicate. We
use words (words themselves do not refer) and other linguistic expressions to refer
to an object in the world, e.g., car, and we use words and other linguistic
expressions to assign a property to an object, e.g., red, and the result of reference
and predication is an assertion, The car is red.
The most serious argument that proponents of cognitive linguistics provide in its
favor is figurative language and the fact that the "logical" approach to language does
not give it due attention:
Figurative language is generally ignored in current theories; at best it is handled by
special, ad hoc descriptive devices. Yet it would be hard to find anything more
pervasive and fundamental in language, even (I maintain) in the dom ain of grammatical
structure (Langacker, Foundations, 1, 1).
human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say
that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors
IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS AND ... 131
as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a
person's conceptual system (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 6).
After claims about the "pervasive" nature of metaphor and after detailed comments
on various types of conceptual metaphors like "structural", "orientational",
"ontological" and "conventional metaphors" and after explaining metaphor as a
"mapping from a source domain to a target domain" (Lakoff, Women), all that we
leam about metaphor (a term burdened with many senses even before the cognitive
paradigm in linguistics carne into fashion) is that it is partial understanding of
concepts in terms of other concepts:
We claim that most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured; most
concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts (Lakoff and J ohnson,
Metaphors, 56).
It also becomes clear that we can "understand a sentence such as '''lnf1ation has
gone up' as true"(Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 170) and that "an understanding
of truth in terms of metaphorical projection is not essentially different from an
understanding of truth in terms of non-metaphorical projection" (ibid., 197). In other
words, Lakoff and Johnson acknowledge the truth of "Snow is white is true if and
only ifp", postulated in truth-conditional semantics, on statements, interpreting p as
"a statement in some universally applicable logic al language" (ibid., 183). In the
standard literature, p is equivalent to "truth-conditions" and "statement" is
equivalent to "the use of a given sentence on different occasions", and uses of
sentences usually imply context, and context is usually not a part of a logical
language.
Understandably, Lakoff and Johnson, being ardent proponents of cognitive
linguistics, avoid using the term "truth-conditions" because by it is meant "the
circumstances in the world that have to hold for a sentence to be true", i.e.,
sentences through truth-conditions are related to the world, and as is well-known,
cognitive linguists ignore not only the relation between language and the world, but
the world as objective reality itself (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 184;
Jackendoff, Languages, ch. 8). For Lakoff and Johnson, truth is based on
understanding one concept in terms of another, i.e., truth is "relative to a conceptual
system" (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 180).
It has to be mentioned that understanding is not a notion that'only p~oponents of
cognitive linguistics believe. For example, another current version of "Snow is
white is true if and only if p" in truth-conditional semantics is: "To know the
meaning of a sentence is to know its truth-conditions." And does not knowing
presuppose understanding at least in some cases? I think we can all agree that it
does. Understanding in analytical philosophy has a different connotation (in the
philosophical sense of the term). It means, e.g., to
have an implicit understanding of the working of language, that is, of the principles
governing the use of language; it is these principles which relate to what is open to view
in the employment of language, unaided by any supposed contact between mind and
mind other than via the medium of language that endows our sentences with the senses
that they carry (Dummett, Analytical, 195).
132 DAFINA GENOV A
Similarly, Lakoff and Johnson do not use the term "proposition" (or thought, at
least in one of the senses of the term) because propositions or thoughts for Frege
and some other philosophers are not psychological but abstract entities:
By a thought I understand not the subjective performer of thinking, but its objective
content, which is capable of being the common property of several thinkers (Frege,
Sense, 52).
Arguments for the "legitimacy" of intentional notions, e.g., propositions, is given in
Moravcsik (Thaught, ch. 1), one of them being that different sentences express the
same proposition ("being the common property of several thinkers"), for example, 1
lave yau, Ich liebe dich and 06ulJ(1M me.
By laying a stress primarily on the ability to understand, cognitivism in
linguistics seems to ignore other abilities of our cognitive system that are based on
understanding: the ability to reason; practical reasoning ofthe form in (4):
(4) X wants to acquire Y
In order to acquire Y, X must do A
Therefore, X does A and acquires Y
and theoretical (and logic al) reasoning, where one comes to a conclusion on the
basis of certain premises, abilities that are also represented in language.
Some proponents of cognitive linguistics postulate that concepts form
hierarchies, clusters and configurations; for analytical philosophers it is beliefs that
are interrelated, a fact acknowledged by psychologists, too. Here are some
examples:
The formation of belief involves a preference or ranking among alternative projections
of what wilI be, must be, or ought to be. In coming to belief p we normalIy come to
favour p over alternatives q, r, etc. Furthermore, since there is no guarantee that the
favoured belief is true, alI beliefs should be construed as projections of reality, not
copies of it. Beliefs can be understood prior to their assessment as true or false (p, q and
rare propositions, the comment is mine) (Moravcsik, Thought, 98).
Conscious experience in particular are those which are avalable ta acts of thinking
which are rejlexively available ta further thinkings. Conscious occurrent thinkings -
conscious acts of wondering-whether, judging-that, supposing-that and the like - are
those which are made available for further, indefinitely rejlexive thinking (Carruthers,
Language, 194).
one belief demands many beliefs, and beliefs demand other basic attitudes such as
intentions, desires and ... the gift oftongues (Davidson, Rational, 473).
In order to master the cognitive paradigm in linguistics, we have, among other
things, to leam that a predicate is the "semantic pole" of a morpheme (Langacker,
F aundatians, 1, 97); that a predication is the "semantic pole" of any linguistic
expression (ibid., 97); that meaning is "cognitive processing" (ibid., 5); that a
dom ain is "contexts for the characterization of a semantic unit" (ibid., 147); that
imagery is "our ability to construe a conceived situation in many different ways
(seeing it from different perspectives, emphasizing certain facets over others,
approaching it at different levels of abstraction, and so on)" (ibid., 47) (the ordinary
IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS AND ... 133
sense of images being "representations of appearances" (Carruthers, Language,
32)); that context is only "the cognitive representation of the interaction between
cognitive categories" (Ungerer and Schmid, Introduction, 54); that a cognitive
model is "the sum of the experienced and stored contexts for a certain field by an
individual" (ibid., 55); that an event is "a cognitive occurrence of any degree of
complexity, be it the firing of a single neuron or a massive happening of intricate
structure and large-scale architecture" (Langacker, Foun dations, 1, 100), not to
mention again what is understood by metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors,
56). And since cognitive grammar "claims that lexicon, morphology and syntax
form a continuum of symbolic units serving to structure conceptual context"
(Langacker, Foundations, 1, 35), only few of the traditionallinguistic terms (units)
are mentioned, e.g., morpheme as in stapler (verb + er) and linguistic expression,
e.g., responsible for (ibid., 35) and Your football is under the table (ibid., 279).
Mentioning word and sentence is carefulIy avoided. New terms replace familiar
ones, e.g., profile and base replace figure and ground (ibid., 183).
It is not only the case that a different sense is introduced for familiar terms, but it
is also the case that many adherents of cognitive linguistics are not consistent with
the terminology they have introduced. For example, linguists using semantic
marker as a theoretical construct in word semantics use it also for the analysis of
sentence meaning (not very common, but possible, e.g., Ravin (Lexical)) and one
would expect (at least I would), proponents of cognitive linguistics to do the same.
Instead, when it comes to analyzing sentences, they do not use the notion cognitive
model, but a notion already in use, e.g., semantic roles as in Langacker
(Foundations, 1, 190) or the notions noun phrase and verb phrase as in Deane
(Grammar). AIso, it is not always clear what the relation of cognitive models and
more specifically of idealized cognitive models (ICM in Lakoffs sense (Women))
and the components of language is. Vervaeke and Green are very explicit in this
respect:
Vandeloise (1990, p. 412) notes that ICMs are linked by Lakoff to such diverse entities
as particular words, modifying phrases (such as "strictly speaking"), mental processes
such as vision, scenarios, live individuals, and proportions. Thus, we find Lakoff
offering an ICM for the Pope on one page (Lakoff, 1987, p. 71) and another for the
proposition expressed by the sentence, "please, sit in the apple juice", on another
(Lakoff, 1987, p. 148)". (Vervaeke and Green 1997, http://www.yorku.ca/faculty/
academic/christo/papers, p. 11).
It might be a brilliant idea to characterize "semantic structure" "relative to
knowledge structures" obliterating the distinctions between metaphorical and non-
metaphorical "projection" of concepts; linguistic expressions, after alI, are symbols
of something, but that something is not only concepts. Cognitive processing does
not necessarily result in endless chains of concepts in which each concept is
understood in terms of another. There are smaller and bigger chunks of
configurations ofconcepts, e.g., to be responsiblefor and Your football is under the
table (Langacker's examples quoted earlier). If there are sentences on the linguistic
level, there must be some entity that corresponds to sentences on the mental level.
134 DAFINA GENOV A
The mental entity that Your football is under the table stands for is a proposition,
and there are psychologists who are not ashamed of using the term (Steinberg,
Psycholinguistics; Anderson, Architecture; Johnson-Laird, Mental; Stevenson,
Language and others) having in mind by it, of course, its most general sense - a
thought. One of the arguments in favor of the propositional representation of
sentences is the fact that not only phrases, e.g., bread and butter, but also simple
sentences, e.g., Mary had a Iamb seem to be represented in memory "in their
entirety" (Steinberg, Psycholinguistics, 122) and not as separate constituents, e.g.,
concepts. Another argument in favor of the same type of representation is that
thoughts can occur spontaneously in the form of "inner verbalization", again as
whole units.
By denying that propositions are mental entities, some proponents of cognitive
linguistics also seem to be denying that human reasoning is based on inference
rules, mental models and heuristic schemas and that they operate on propositions
and not on concepts. It is obvious that we cannot separate categorization (and
conceptualization in the sense explicated here) from reasoning. Recent experimental
findings in psychology show that inductive probabilistic reasoning, among other
things, involves "projection" of properties of a category to another similar term,
e.g., Dogs can get disease is used as a premise for inferring Cats can get disease
(Heit, Knowledge). In other words, the cognitive approach in linguistics seems not
to be explicit on the difference between understanding on the one hand, and
propositional thinking and reasoning with propositions, on the other, and how
this is formulated in language.
Language surely seems to be more than mere symbols for the understanding of
one concept in terms of another. Language is "involved" in conscious propositional
thinking (Carruthers, Language, 134). Even Steinberg, who is one ofthe proponents
ofthe view that thought is independent oflanguage, acknowledges that:
language could be said to affect the content and direction of particular thoughts. These
particular important instances are: (1) language may be used to provide new ideas; (2)
language may be used to bring about a change in beliefs and values (Steinberg,
Psycholinguistics, 116).
Our competence of "the working of language" can persuade us, for instance, after
reading a book on Buddhism, to change our religious beliefs. AIso, prior linguistic
competence is required for the acquisition of many concepts and beliefs (Carruthers,
Language, 85). For example, one cannot imagine a human being not speaking any
language to entertain thoughts about, say, the structure of a tumor cell. As far as
images are concemed, they are not excluded from the process ofthinking (ibid., 36).
We can entertain a "mixed thought" (mixed with images) when reasoning about
some everyday practic al problem, e.g., hanging a picture on the wall. We can think 1
can put it ... , the inner verbalization being followed by an image of the wall.
Some proponents of cognitive linguistics have a neurophysiological
understanding ofthe notions thought and concept, e.g., Langacker:
what 1 call a thought is the occurrence of a complex neurological, ultimately
electrochemical event, and to say that 1 have formed a concept is merely to note that a
particular pattern of neurological activity has become established, so that functionally
IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS AND ... 135
equivalent events can be evoked and repeated with relative ease (Langacker,
Foundations, 1, 100).
According to the philosophical position, thoughts occur (and we are aware of their
occurrence as opposed to animals, which are capable of primitive unconscious
thinking only); they cause the occurrence of further thoughts; they have content and
are formulated in language (Carruthers, Language, 229).
By denying any dualism about the structure and organization of the human mind
and by placing our experiences mainly in perception (What about acquiring
knowledge indirect1y, through inferencing?) human understanding can be seen to a
large extent as an automatic process, and because of this the "formation, testing and
changing of beliefs" are not seen as "key mental processes" (Moravcsik, Thought,
48) that involve volition. A good counter-argument to the view that "a thought is
[not only] the occurrence of an electrochemical event" is our conscious awareness
of various cognitive abilities like knowing, thinking, believing, understanding,
planning and explaining that are expressed in sentences of naturallanguage: 1 don 't
know it, 1 think you are right, 1 can 't believe you did it, 1 think you understand, etc.
Proponents of cognitive linguistics are also expected to answer another question: "If
understanding is taken as an unanalyzable primitive, what is its relation to
interpreting, integrating, assessing and presuming - cognitive practices that we
employ in everyday conversation"?
Some proponents of cognitive linguistics claim, as we have already mentioned,
that conceptualization is "grounded" in experience (no-one would deny that) and
their account of spacial prepositions is convincing from that point of view
(Jackendoff and Landau, Spacial, 99-124; Lakoff, Women), but I am just curious
how they would explain conjunctions stand ing for logical concepts like and, or,
if. .. then and not in terms of experience (no such account has yet been offered as far
as I am concemed and for obvious reasons). I am also most curious how The
question that arises then is to what extent one is justified in attributing to the
composite structure any of the properties that distinguish these various possibilities
from one another (Langacker, Foundations, 1, 281); a sentence from theoretical
discourse is constructed from concepts understood in terms of other concepts and,
more specifically, how any ofthe postulated cognitive schemas THE CONTAINER,
THE PART - WHOLE, THE CENTER - PERIPHERY or THE SOURCE - PATH
- GOAL (Lakoff 1987) is exemplified in it. Or, how a sentence from a
metalanguage, e.g., Nouns have gender, case and number can be analyzed in similar
terms. In other words, if abstract human thought is "grounded" in concrete
experience and if metaphor is a basic mode of human cognition (Lakoff and
Johnson, Metaphors), that is, if metaphor relates abstract experiences to salient
aspects of our concrete experience of the world, how are abstract structures like
rules, principles and laws explained in terms of conceptual metaphor? Another
question that arises is: "If "nominal expressions" like mind, thought, concept,
perception, etc. are understood only as "convenient reifications" (Langacker,
Foundations, 1, 100), what is the nature of primitive cognitive representations like
space, time, vis ion and color that some proponents of cognitive linguistics
postulate as "basic domains" in their cognitive linguistics"? Are they innate
136 DAFINA GENOV A
concepts (to use the more accepted term) as some psychologists and philosophers
claim? Are they acquired or are they only inherited predispositions? If our
understanding is grounded in perception and if cognitive schemas are pervasive,
why is it that very often we realize that we do not fully understand what other
people say? I agree that the reason for misunderstanding is internal but the reason
seems to be what some scholars call intentionality as a general property of the mind.
One can also question the "irreducibility of basic domains". For Keller (Review)
"mappings" from a "source dom ain" onto a "target domain" are simply analogies
that
are only possible as a consequence of inherent similarities in a given source and a given
target domain. The paradox lies in the fact that an analogy is not irreducible if it relies
on a priori structural similarities. What might inherent similarities be, if not yet
prefigurative (dare 1 say literal?) structural representations? (Keller, Review, 777).
In other words, the similarity is preexistent and not estabIished after "mappings"
between domains.
For many proponents of cognitive linguistics, understanding is based on
structural configurations of concepts; philosophers speak of "conceptual
dependency", the only difference being in the point of view of the two paradigms.
The starting point in cognitive linguistics seems to be mind-to-Ianguage while the
starting point in analytical philosophy seems to be language-to-mind-to-reality.
For some cognitive Iinguists it is not only the case that new senses of familiar
terms are introduced; it is also the case that terms overlap or coincide with other
well-estabIished terms. For instance, it is not clear what the difference is between
conceptualization and a concept (for arguments that Lakoff (Women) does not
make such a distinction, see Vervaeke and Green (http://www.yorku.ca/faculty/
academicl christo/papers)). AIso, there seems to be some similarity between an ICM
and an archetype, a similarity acknowledged by Langacker himself:
Numerous constructs are characterized with reference to certain "idealized cognitive
models" (Lakoff 1987) that approach the status of archetypes, being grounded in
everyday experience and fundamental to our conception of the world (Langacker,
Foundations, II, 13).
Langacker is probably right to claim that archetypes and cognitive models have
something in common. They both are idealized representations of experience, but
this is where the similarity ends. In the case of archetypes, typical human experience
is attributed to represent "superhuman, or even cosmic significance", while no such
claims are made about cognitive models. Archetypes are "unconscious psychic
dispositions" for creating myths and for reacting emotionally; they also Iink the
conscious and the unconscious. Archetypes are at the basis of self-awareness and
self-knowledge, and in this sense, they seem to have a more restricted significance
compared to claims made about cognitive models. The images on the conscious
level that point back to a very few basic archetypes are of a limitless variety and are
most often not under conscious control. For that reason, we may fear and deny them
and try to repress them. Obviously, cognitive models do not have such a fateful
significance.
IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS AND ... 137
Stereotypes are also idealized mental representations (they can be inac curate)
of, at least, natural kinds of objects, and they have to be compared rather to
prototypes than to ICMs because stereotypical representations are representations
ofreal world knowledge and not ofthe imposition of subjective features of an object
in itself, as it is the case with ICMs. When commenting on stereotypes, we shall
have in mind Putnam's understanding ofthe term that he uses in the explication of
word meaning on the epistemologicallevel. For Putnam
In ordinary parlance a 'stereotype' is a conventional (frequently malicious) idea (which
may be wildly inaccurate) of what X looks like or acts like or is (Putnam, Meaning,
249).
Stereotypes are conventional beliefs (like Tigers are striped) that can be also "based
on untypical or unrepresentative members of a natural kind" (ibid., 250) ("three-
legged tigers and albina tigers" are still tigers) as distinguished from prototypes,
which are the best example of a category (e.g., a sparrow is a prototypical bird while
penguins are not). Most often though, stereotypes "capture features possessed by
paradigmatic members" of a class (ibid., 250) and in this respect they are not much
different from prototypes. The difference between the two is that with stereotypes as
beliefs they are socially determined in the same way as extension. For example, in
American culture "speakers are required to know what tigers look like", while in
American Indian culture speakers are required to be able to tell an elm from a beech
(ibid., 249) and in this sense stereotypes are similar to ICMs, which are also culture
specific.
One can look for and find other similarities between the mental representations
and other mental representations that many cognitive linguists are guided by. Mental
representations, no matler how different they are in other respects, have one aspect
in common - they are idealizations (or generalizations) of the entity they represent
(a real world, mental or a linguistic one), e.g., no-one has seen a prototypical bird or
the archetype of a woman, the anima. We are not going to look for all the possible
similarities and differences among mental representations. What is of great
importance is the stance cognitive linguists take to the representation of linguistic
rules - an issue that we shall come back to later and comment on in greater detail.
To sum up for now, many cognitive linguists reject the classical model of
categories (the necessary and sufficient features) and replace it with the prototype
theory; by claiming that language is highly metaphorical, they also reject truth-
conditional semantics, which relates language to the world (in model-theoretic
terms, of course) and by positing the view that grammar is only symbolic of the
"construal of conceptual content" they reject the autonomy of syntax (rejected, as is
well known, by other linguists, philosophers and psychologists for various reasons).
Generative grammar is also rejected altogether since it is viewed as "a full and
precise mathematical characterization" ofthe well-formed sentences in a language.
As has been mentioned, many cognitive linguists are against formalization (for
them Chomsky's approach is also formal, not to mention Tarski's or Montague's);
they are in favor of postulating the least possible number of principles in a theory -
a doctrine to which they are not the only adherents. For instance, the Minimalist
Program is based on "the sparest set of assumptions"; relevance theory, a
138 DAFINA GENOV A
cognitively grounded theory of linguistic communication (Sperber and Wilson,
Relevance) is based on a single principle - the principle of relevance - although, one
has to admit that if sparsity of principles is always theoretically justifiable, it might
not always capture the essence of the entity/ies studied. What is more important is
that "syntactocentric" theories are not psychologically plausible - when we produce
utterances we do not start from deep structure (syntax) and get to the surface
structure (semantics). Semantically based grammars, as is well known, are more
suitable for the explication of the two basic language abilities - the production and
understanding of utterances and from that point of view cognitive linguistics is more
acceptable, since it does not attribute secondary significance to meaning. The point
is that meaning is equated with conceptualization and cognitive processing, and as a
result, language is seen not "as a direct object of inquiry", but only as a means of
explicating how concepts are understood. Linguistic rules and structures are not
granted an independent status; they are grounded in general cognitive schemas and
cannot be separated from their instantiation (Langacker, Foundations, II, 535) and
yet it is not made obvious how such claims are substantiated. At least to some, rules
and principles are metarepresentations of preexisting observable structures.
A major objection to the cognitive paradigm in linguistics is the fact that
cognitive schemas are only hypothesized without being grounded in empirical
results the way that prototypes and prototype effects are from experiments In
cognitive psychology. Or, to quote Ackerman:
It is one thing to provide evidence for how inferring, metaphorical mapping, etc. are
accomplished by means of language use, but quite another to demonstrate that
constraints on grammatical structures, or on linguistic systems quite generally derive
from conceptual structures (Ackerman, Observations, 377).
He is also right to claim that the term "conceptual" is more appropriate than the term
"cognitive" in this context since the latter is the more general of the two and would
thus subsume generative grammar and other cognitively grounded linguistic
theories. In the sense used, "cognitive" rather means "conceptualization" as a crucial
explanatory component of grammar" (ibid., 366).
Linguistic expressions are, to remind the re ader again, only symbols of
conceptualization. As a result the traditional distinction between the lexicon,
morphology and syntax is obliterated and linguistic rules are rejected. The closest
one can get to linguistic rules are cognitive schemas and in this respect cognitive
linguistics is very close to connectionist modeling of cognitive processing
(Rumelhart and McClelland, Parallel; Rumelhart et al., Schemata) in cognitive
science where no distinction is made between general and specific knowledge and
where no rules are postulated. The model is parallel and distributed and is based on
excitatory links between elements within a language constituent and inhibitory links
between elements in separate constituents. In connectionist simulation of cognitive
processing the mind/brain does not contain a central processing unit as is the case
with the modular account of cognitive processing. The brain system is locally
managed in terms of trial and error, and it has the ability to modify and shape itself
employing prototype knowledge representations. Paradoxically, one of the
arguments of cognitive linguists for the rejection of generative grammar is its
IDEALIZED COGNITIVE MODELS AND ... 139
"formalism", and yet at the same time cognitive linguists embrace connectionist
modeling, which is worse in this respect - it is more abstract and it abounds in
mathematical formulas.
The attempts of cognitive linguists to place linguistic theory in a wider context
are not isolated. Chomsky himself holds the view that the study of language has to
be a branch of cognitive psychology and that it is the task of psycholinguists and
psychologists to specify the details of a performance model. Similarly, Sperber and
Wilson's theory of linguistic communication is also grounded in cognitive
psychology. Undoubtedly, further empirical research not only in cognitive
psychology, but also in cognitive science in general, will help us learn more about
the cognitive basis of language. The point is that a linguistic theory has to combine a
cognitive conception of language with a communicative one, since very often we
utter a sentence expressing a certain thought in order to communicate something
different (excluding metaphor, metonymy and irony). In other words, cognitive
linguistics explicates private but not public language. Even Chomsky has admitted
(Chomsky, New) that language is not only "individual" and "internal" but "external"
as well. It is another matter that he holds the view that the latter cannot be defined.
For example, when we try to be polite, we are not guided by psychological
considerations alone, we are guided by social ones as well, that is, in linguistic
analysis different factors have to be taken into consideration, e.g., the social aspects
of verbal interaction. In this respect cognitive linguistics can only complement but
not replace theories that regard grammar as the product of more than one factor.
I have provided arguments for and against cognitive linguistics. I personally am
not in favor of the methodological determinism that is typical of some theories that
maximize a doctrine or a point of view while minimizing other possibilities, and
many presentations of cognitive linguistics are such examples. After all, one has
always to bear in mind that if syntax is not autonomous, language is. It is its own
means and devices that we put to use when we communicate.
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