Lecture Note on Cognitive Linguistics

TRACING THE ROOTS
Cognitive Linguistics:
ferdinand bulusan
Student | PhD in Language Education
Saint Louis University-Baguio
27 January 2018
Saturday | 3:00 PM
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
1

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Saint Louis University-Baguio
Ferdinand Bulusan | PhLEd Student
Topic Map HOW did Psycholinguistics exist?
Pre-Chomskyian Era
Chomskyian Era
WHO are the prominent individuals in the field of Psycholing?
WHO is Noam Chomsky?
WHAT are the key concepts of cognitive linguistics?
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
2
WHAT are his contributions?

18th Century 20th Century
WOLFGANG
VON
KEMPELEN
=
speaking
machine
1791
Mental faculties such as the
memory for words were
localized in specific regions of
the brain. The stronger such an
innate ability, the larger the
corresponding brain region.
Franz Joseph Gall
final two decades of the 18th century
3

1786
There must have been
some proto-language
from which all
languages in the family
evolved.
William Jones
Ever since, the empirical study
of language origins and
language functions in human
communication has been an
important chapter of
psycholinguistics.
Morris (1938) is the first to
study the interrelationship
between the signs and
symbols as well as language
and thought.
4

Morris and his
logical positivistic division
• Syntactic = the relationship of signs to signs
• Semantic= the relationship of signs to their
meanings
• Pragmatic= the relationship of signs to the
people who use them
George A. Miller
logico- philosophical frame
1964
such a classification of
the field into problems of
structure, of
comprehension, of a
collaboration of relevant
disciplines such as
linguistics, psychology
and philosophy was very
much needed in the
present time
5

COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS BY NOAM CHOMSKY
George A. Miller
1964
Pragmatics = psychology
Semantics = philosophy
Syntactics = linguistics
6

Four Major
Periods
in the
History of
Psycholing
FORMATIVE
LINGUISTIC
COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLINGUISTIC THEORY, PSYCHOLOGICAL
THEORY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
7

NOAM CHOMSKY
started the enterprise of ‘TG-Grammar’
and proposed the ‘innateness principle’
which helped the psycholinguists to
achieve a new dimension altogether.
WILHELM WUNDT
brought psycholinguistics out
of Romanticist evaluation of
language and was keen to
show that language could be
explained on the basis of
psychological principles.
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
known as prototypical
structuralist attempted in
1914 to pay careful
homage to Wundtian
psychology.
8

FORMATIVE PERIOD (1950’s to mid 1960’s)
amazing symmetrical relationship that it started between linguistics and
psycholinguistics
RESEARCHERS IN BOTH FIELDS WERE COMMITTED TO AN
OPERATIONALIST PHILOSOPHY
‘DISCOVERY
PROCEDURES’
Behaviorism-dominant and
experiments were rigorous
theoretical claim
could only be valid
when it was based on
real world experience
or situation
‘INFORMATION
THEORY’
e.g. Shannon and Weaver
(1949)
9

Osgood and Sebeok (1954): psycholinguistics deals with the process of
encoding and decoding as they relate states of messages to states of
communicators.
LINGUISTS took the states of messages
and PSYCHOLOGISTStook the states of communicators, and
by default, the encoding and decoding processes
‘Psycho-linguistics’ as a
term appeared in the
annual Review of
Psychology in 1960
Chomsky had a
meager citation on
psycholinguistics
10

LINGUISTIC PERIOD (mid 1960’s to mid 1970’s)
The rise of the transformational generative grammar in linguistics
Can anyone give his idea about TG
grammar?
It is the mental capacity of generating
sentences with the use of unconscious knowledge of
language which he calls Universal Grammar (UG). It
generates only the well-formed or grammatically correct
sentences of a language since it is meant to create the
rules and principles which are in the mind or brain of a
native speaker
11

the claim about the division of
labor that was the sole basis of
‘formative period’ was called into
question and theoretical
assumptions were rebuked.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism
came to dictate the shape of
psycholinguistic research.
operationalist philosophy cannot provide
adequate explanation to the grammar of
any natural language
promoted deductive approach in linguistic research
and advocated for the study of competence of the
language than the performance
competence of the user for languages should be
the main concern for a linguistic analysis
12

Thus, the centrality of grammar was
taken as a basic assumption, with the
sentence emerging as the prime unit in
this quest to understand grammar.
understanding of
competence
would be crucial to
understanding the
nature of actual
performance
Can anyone
differentiate
linguistic
competence and
performance?
“Competence” is the
knowledge of language.
“Performance”
involves actual real-time use and
may diverge radically from the
underlying competence due to
environmental disturbances and
memory limitations.
13

showed that there was much more to
be learned from Psycholinguistic
research than just treating this as a
weak hypothesis
To test whether such linguistic rules of grammar
were involved in language comprehension
Aims of
psycholinguistic
researches during
this period
To test whether the number and complexity of mental
operations performed during language processing
had to do anything with the number and complexity
of the formal rules prescribed in TG-grammar for the
grammatical derivation of the sentences
Key realizations
during this period
McNeill (1966, 1970): that the child
enters the process of language
learning with an innate predisposition
for the general form of linguistic rules,
and possibly even certain linguistic
categories
Lenneberg (1967) : the
capacity for language
acquisition is species-specific
and is a genetically
determined attribute of
humans and humans alone.
‘Developmental Psycholinguistics’
14

COGNITIVE PERIOD (mid 1970’s early 1980’s)
15

Jerry Fodor (1966) Eric Lenneberg (1967)
“dependence of
language upon
human
cognition”
“language is
nothing but one of
the several
outcomes of more
fundamental
cognitive
processes”
16

However, Bever (1970)
and Slobin (1973)
opined that linguistic
structures are not
learned independent of
semantic concepts and
discourse functions and
the acquisition of
language was explained as a
result of the interaction
between the linguistic and other
behavioral systems.
CHOMSKYAN LINGUISTICS
(Cognitive Linguistics)
-- the mind is modular and has its initial
structure.
-- linguistic knowledge is distinct from
conceptual knowledge, social cognition,
interpersonal skills, math abilities, music
abilities, abilities to reason and so on.
17

NOAM CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky is a Linguistics professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is probably
better known for his controversial political views.
focused on how languages developed
focused on how grammar describes what speakers
know about a language
believed this has to be integrated in language
learning theory (Fodor, Bever, and Garrett, 1974,
p.81.)
“we not only speak language but also understand
it.” He reasoned that there had to be more than
just a stimulus/response, there had to be a
grammar that we all used when learning to speak
any language (Ryan, 1991.)
He researched the similarities of languages and
developed mathematical models to use with them
(Chomsky, 1953, p. 245.)
18

NOAM CHOMSKY
developed the theory of
UNIVERSAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
to explain how language is learned (Cogswell, p. 54.)
Children seem to learn language instantly (Smith, p.
13.) “mental organ”… we are all born with much like
our other organs and it develops the same way they
do (Smith, p. 23.)
hypothesizes that language is innate; humans are born
with the ability to learn language because of the mental
organ for language (LAD). He observed that children
easily learn to speak, will do it without any
reinforcement, and do not need to have a high I.Q. to
speak competently.
19

NOAM CHOMSKY
innateness hypothesis challenged the
behaviorists’ view of how humans learn
language. Humans cannot predict what
a speaker will say because they do not
know what the stimulus is until after
the sentence was spoken. This means
the stimulus has to be internal
(Chomsky, 1959, p 32.)
Chomsky’s theory on language acquisition has lead to
the development of the CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS
which says children need to learn a language before
they reach puberty in order for them to be competent
speakers of the language. If children have not learned a
language by the end of this period, they are not going to
be able to master it (Smith, p. 120.)
20

The core idea in Cognitive Linguistics is that
meanings are mental entities in conceptual
space. Meanings are in people's minds.
They are not independent entities in the
external world, as is the case in objectivist
models.
The external world is only indirectly relevant
in that meanings are constrained by how
human beings perceive of the world.
21

THREE MAIN APPROACHES OF COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
(Ungerer and Schmid, 1997)
THE EXPERIENTAL VIEW
THE PROMINENCE VIEW
THE ATTENTIONAL VIEW
22

Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) were among
the first ones to
pinpoint this
conceptual potential,
especially in the case
of metaphors.
It is the user of the
language who tells us what
is going on in his mind
when he produces and
understands words and
sentences.
The knowledge and experience human beings have of the
things and events that they know well is transferred to those
other objects and events, which they are not so familiar with,
and even to abstract concepts.
23

Interpret this.
Did your experience help you in
describing this scene?
Have you thought of any RELATED episode
in your life in describing this?
Your knowledge and experience of
the things and events that you
know well is transferred to those
other objects and events
Attributes including associations and
impressions which are part of our
experience are used
24

THE PROMINENCE VIEW
It is based on concepts of profiling and
figure/ground segregation: Rubin (1886-1951).
The prominence principle explains why, when
we look at an object in our environment, we
single it out as a perceptually prominent
figure standing out from the ground.
This principle can also be applied to the study of language;
especially, to the study of local relations (cf. Brugman 1981, 1988;
Casad 1982, 1993; Lindner 1982; Herskovits 1986; Vandeloise 1991;
among others).
25

Describe what you see.
A. The garden is swarming with bees.
B. Bees are swarming in the garden.
The prominence view concerns the selection and arrangement of the information
that is expressed. It is actually an explanation of how the information in a clause is
selected and arranged.
26

THE ATTENTIONAL VIEW
This view assumes that
what we actually
express reflects which
parts of an event
attract our attention.
Depending on our cognitive ability to direct our
attention, different aspects of this frame are
highlighted, resulting in different linguistic
expressions (Talmy 1988, 1991, and 1996).
Analyzing the
sentence in terms
of attention
allocation, the
attentional view
explains why one
stage of the event
is expressed in the
sentence and why
other stages are
not.
27

What we actually
express reflects which
parts of an event
attract our attention
(p. F39). That is, an
utterance reflects what
is paid attention to. In
language the same
event can be expressed
in different ways
because of our different
attentions.
Rosa learned from teacher Pakleb.
Teacher Pakleb taught Rosa.
28

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC THEORY, PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY
AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
(early 1980’s to present)
linguistic approach here is now
one which takes information
processing constraints into
account. "Correctness" of a
grammatical theory is no
longer being argued
here, for grammatical theories
can all be internally "correct"
Psycholinguistics is now
involved in a larger field of
inquiry, that is, the nature of
knowledge, the structure of
mental representations, and
how these are used in mental
processes like reasoning and
decision-making.
development of Cognitive
Science as an interdisciplinary
activity
29

In your own words,
how can you describe
the historical
development of
psycholinguistics as a
field of study?
30

Do you think it is fine
that psycholinguists
have differing
opinions on this field?
What does it imply?
31

For Chomsky, linguistics is just a branch of
cognitive psychology (Lyons, 1991: 125).
Chomsky has placed linguistics at the core of
studies of the mind.
Do you think psycholinguistics is more of
an interdisciplinary field of study other
than a separate branch of cognitive
psychology? Why or why not?
32

Language and Society Saint Louis University-Baguio
REFERENCES
Cifuentes Honrubia, José Luis. 1994. Gramática cognitiva. Fundamentos críticos, Madrid:
Eudema Croft,
William and Cruse, D. Alan. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Cuenca,
Maria Josep and Hilferty, Joseph. 1999. Introduccción a la Lingüística Cognitiva. Barcelona:
Ariel.
Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens (eds). 2005. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive
Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, David. 2002. Cognitive Linguistics: an
introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ungerer, Friederich and Schmid, Hans-Jürgen.
1996. An introduction to cognitive linguistics. London: Longman.
33

“Language disguises thought.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
for listening!
ferdinand bulusan
Student | PhD in Language Education
Saint Louis University Baguio
34

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