ABSTRACT
Cognitive linguistics, which was developed in the late 1970s, sees language as an interactive part of the cognitive abilities of the human mind such as perception, memory, attention, emotion, reasoning, etc. It is opposed to the traditional approach to language, which is rooted in the Aristotelian belief in classical definitions of categories, in objectivist realism (the existence of a mindindependent reality), and in the possibility of stating absolute truths. Cognitive linguistics, in contrast, adopts a phenomenological approach as its philosophical basis (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 181, 1999) – all individuals have an intentional relationship to the world and their access to the world or their consciousness is realized by their bodily experiences of that world (Geeraerts 1985: 355).
