English Department Hosts 3rd Student Exhibition (Grammatically Correct: A Poster Presentation Event)
Cognitive linguistics is a rather recent linguistic theory. Though it is always difficult to locate exactly the date of birth of any theory, an important date in the inception of this theory is 1987. In this year, three of its foundational books were published: Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Langacker’s Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive linguistics first started as a reaction against generative approaches to language. Chomskyan-generative tradition had built a view of language which made very strong commitments about the primacy of syntax, disregarding the role of semantics and pragmatics in linguistic theorizing. This was considered highly inappropriate for many authors, who, like Langacker, thought that: “Meaning is what language is all about; the analyst who ignores it to concentrate solely on matters of form severely impoverishes the natural and necessary subject matter of the discipline and ultimately distorts the character of the phenomena described.”(Langacker 1987:12)
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