The Generalisation Commitment
One of the assumptions that cognitive linguists make is that there are common structuring principles that hold across different aspects of language, and that an important function of linguistics is to identify these common principles. In modern linguistics, the study of language is often separated into distinct areas such as phonology (sound), semantics (word and sentence meaning), pragmatics (meaning in discourse context), morphology (word structure) syntax (sentence structure) and so on. This is particularly true of formal approaches: approaches to modelling language that posit explicit mechanical devices or procedures operating on theoretical primitives in order to produce the complete set of linguistic possibilities in a given language. Within formal approaches (such as the Generative Grammar approach developed by Noam Chomsky), it is usually argued that areas such as phonology, semantics and syntax concern significantly different kinds of structuring principles operating over different kinds of primitives. For instance, a syntax ‘module’ is an area in the mind concerned with structuring words into sentences, whereas a phonology ‘module’ is concerned with structuring sounds into patterns permitted by the rules of any given language, and by human language in general. This modular view of mind rein forces the idea that modern linguistics is justified in separating the study of language into distinct subdisciplines, not only on grounds of practicality but because the components of language are wholly distinct and, in terms of organisation, incommensurable.
Cognitive linguistics acknowledges that it may often be useful, for practical purposes, to treat areas such as syntax, semantics and phonology as being notion ally distinct. The study of syntactic organisation involves, at least in part, the study of slightly different kinds of cognitive and linguistic phenomena than the study of phonological organisation. However, given the ‘Generalisation Commitment’, cognitive linguists disagree that the ‘modules’ or ‘subsystems’ of language are organised in significantly divergent ways, or indeed that distinct modules or subsystems even exist. Below we briefly consider the properties of three areas of language in order to give an idea of how apparently distinct language components can be seen to share fundamental organisational features. The three areas we will look at are (1) categorisation, (2) polysemy and (3) metaphor.
