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The cognitive linguistics position

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C3P101

2025-12-08

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The cognitive linguistics position

The position adopted in cognitive linguistics is that there are commonalities in the ways humans experience and perceive the world and in the ways human think and use language. This means that all humans share a common conceptualising capacity. However, these commonalities are no more than constraints, delimiting a range of possibilities. As we have seen, there is striking diversity in the two domains we have surveyed, which shows that the way English speakers think and speak about space and time by no means represents the only way of thinking and speaking about space and time. According to cognitive linguists, language not only reflects conceptual structure, but can also give rise to conceptualisation. It appears that the ways in which different languages ‘cut up’ and ‘label’ the world can differentially influence non-linguistic thought and action. It follows that the basic commitments of cognitive linguistics are con sonant with a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a position that some linguists argue is gathering increasing empirical support.