C

Cognitive linguistics (CL) started as a new linguistic paradigm in the late 1970s. In contrast to structuralist and generative predecessors, CL sees language, not as an independent, self-sufficient system, but as a faculty integrated with other cognitive abilities such as perception, memory, attention, imagination, emotion, reasoning, etc. CL’s main focus is on the pairing of form and meaning. Linguistic meaning is not an autonomous system in the mind, but part and parcel of our conceptual world. CL has broken away from the traditional Aristotelian belief in classical definitions of conceptual categories and from any form of objectivist realism, which, in contrast to the phenomenologist revolution of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty (1945, 1979), accepts the existence of a mind-independent reality and the possibility of stating absolute truths. In contrast, CL adopts an experientialist realism (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 181; 1999) and a phenomenologist outlook (Geeraerts 1985: 355; 1993) as its philosophical basis: all individuals have access to the world by their bodily experiences of that world (experientialism), and their embodied relations to the world including other humans is simultaneously a conscious and intentional one (phenomenology). As a linguistic theory, CL has given up all traditional Saussurean and second-generation structuralist axioms reducing language to a self-sufficient system, especially dichotomies such as langue vs. parole, synchrony vs. diachrony, syntax vs. semantics, lexis vs.