ABSTRACT
To start on a personal note, this chapter is my first opportunity to bring together two strands of my working life which have so far been quite separate (Hudson, 2002a): building models of language structure (Hudson, 1976, 1984, 1990, 2007), and building bridges between academic linguistics and school teaching (Hudson, 2004; Hudson & Walmsley, 2005). Of course, the two strands have influenced each other in my own thinking but I thought it would merely have confused both goals to combine them. After all, I was arguing that a cognitive model was right for language because it was true rather than because it was useful; whereas the arguments for applying linguistics in school teaching were all about usefulness rather than truth. However, I was always aware that truth and utility are hard to separate: ultimately, the most useful approach to solving a problem must, surely, be one based on a true understanding of the problem, and ultimately, a true theory must apply to the real-world situations that we define as problems. I very much regret the historical trends of the last few decades which, at least in the UK, have pushed “theoretical linguistics” and “applied linguistics” further apart, and welcome the opportunities that Cognitive Linguistics provides for bringing them together again.
