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LING-752 Seminar: Applying Cognitive Approaches to Language
Spring only
W 4:15-6:45
The question of the complex relationship between language, experience, and the mind has been one with which every approach to linguistics has grappled. Cognitive perspectives hold that language is part of a cognitive system which involves perception, emotions, categorization, conceptualization, and reasoning. All these cognitive abilities interact with language and are influenced by language. The perspective on language offered by Cognitive Linguistics also emphasizes the effect of human experience of the world, the unique way humans perceive and conceptualize that experience, and how these are in turn reflected in the structure of language itself.
A central claim of all cognitive approaches is that grammar is not represented as an autonomous component. The problem of how people construct meaning in thought and language is at the heart of research in a cognitive approach to language. As such it emphasizes a usage-based conception of language and evidences a concern for contextualized, dynamically constructed meanings and for the grounding of language use in both cognitive and social interaction.
The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the basic tenets of cognitive linguistics and consider how these perspectives might help us gain insights into issues concerning cross-linguistic universals and variation, cross-cultural communication, and language learning. There will be a special emphasis on applications of CL to issues in Second Language Learning.
Some of the specific issues we will examine include:
-The nature and ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language and what it might tell us about human cognition
-Issues of lexical polysemy: the polysemy networks of English prepositions, the role of polysemy in explaining grammatical elements such as modals
-The relationship of semantics and syntax, in particular the notion that grammatical constructions themselves carry meaning independently of the words in the sentence
-Applications of theoretical insights to issues in language learning, both first and second
READINGS:
Goldberg, Adele (2006) Constructions at Work
Tomasello, M. (2003) Constructing a Language
Tyler, Andrea & Evans, Vyvyan (2003)The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition .
Packet of Readings
Prerequisite: One of the following:
Metaphor and the Mind
Introduction to Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language
Syntax 1 or permission of instructor
Cognitive approaches to language are relatively new. Recently they have been drawing the attention of a number of leading scholars in the areas of discourse analysis (e.g., Chafe, Gumperz, Hopper, and Thompson), first language learning (e.g., Bowerman, Slobin and Tomasello), and applied linguistics/second language learning (e.g. Nick Ellis, Richard Schmidt, Peter Robinson). There is growing interest in how the approach can be used to address issues of language description, language acquisition, and language teaching.
In past years, student papers written for seminars in cognitive approaches resulted in presentations at several national and international conferences. Paper topics included:
A cognitive metaphor analysis of the pragmatics of Korean negation
Discourse-level metaphor in American Sign Language
A cognitive blending approach to humorous discourse
A cognitive metaphor analysis of Spanish ser and estar
An examination of the semantic network of the German preposition uber
An examination of the semantic network of German case
Metaphor transfer in the Lithuanian speech of Lithuanian-English bilinguals
An experimental examination of the semantic networks of in and over
An effects-of-instruction study on teaching English prepositions from a cognitive perspective
Effects-of-instruction studies on teaching English modals to advanced L2 learners
Analysis of prepositional polysemy in Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese
A cognitive blending approach to doctor-patient conversations
An examination of Korean noun classifiers
A mental space analysis of the English articles
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: One of the following: Metaphor and Mind, INtroduction to Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language, Syntax 1 or permission of instructor
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