Linguistics, ed. by Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn, published by Mouton in 1988. This
substantial volume contains a number seminal papers by Langacker, Talmy, and
others which made it widely influential, and indeed of influence continuing to this
day.
In 1989, the first conference on Cognitive Linguistics was organized in Duisburg,
Germany, by Rene Dirven. At that conference, it was decided to found a new
organization, the International Cognitive Linguistic Association, which would hold
biennial conferences to bring together researchers working in cognitive linguistics.
1
Fillmore, Ch. Frame Semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm (ed. by the Linguistic Society
of Korea), 111-37. Seoul: Hanshin. 1982.
2
Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1987.
3
Langacker, Ronald. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol.I. ,II, Stanford University Press. 1987/1991.
4
Talmy, Len. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 2000.
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The Duisburg conference was retroactively declared the first International Cognitive
Linguistics Conference.
The journal Cognitive Linguistics was also conceived in the mid 1980s, and its first
issue appeared in 1990 under the imprint of Mouton de Gruyter, with Dirk Geeraerts
as editor.
At the Duisburg conference, Rene Dirven proposed a new book series, Cognitive
Linguistics Research, as another publication venue for the developing field. The first
CLR volume, a collection of articles by Ronald Langacker, brought together under the
title Concept, Image and Symbol, came out in 1990. The following year, Volume 2 of
Langacker'sFoundations of Cognitive Grammar appeared.
During the 1990s Cognitive Linguistics became widely recognized as an important
field of specialization within Linguistics, spawning numerous conferences in addition
to the biennial ICLC meetings. The work of Lakoff, Langacker, and Talmy formed the
leading strands of the theory, but connections with related theories such as
Construction Grammar were made by many working cognitive linguists, who tended
to adopt representational eclecticism while maintaining basic tenets of cognitivism.
Korea, Hungary, Thailand, Croatia, and other countries began to host cognitive
linguistic research and activities. The breadth of research could be seen in the
journal Cognitive Linguistics which had become the official journal of the ICLA. Arie
Verhagen took over as editor, leading the journal into its second phase.
By the mid-1990s, Cognitive Linguistics as a field was characterized by a defining
set of intellectual pursuits practiced by its adherents, summarized in the Handbook of
Pragmatics under the entry for Cognitive Linguistics:
Because cognitive linguistics sees language as embedded in the overall cognitive
capacities of man, topics of special interest for cognitive linguistics include: the
structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality,
systematic polysemy, cognitive models, mental imagery and metaphor); the functional
principles of linguistic organization (such as iconicity and naturalness); the conceptual
interface between syntax and semantics (as explored by cognitive grammar and
construction grammar); the experiential and pragmatic background of language-in-
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use; and the relationship between language and thought, including questions about
relativism and conceptual universals.
For many cognitive linguists, the main interest in CL lies in its provision of a
better-grounded approach to and set of theoretical assumptions for syntactic and
semantic theory than generative linguistics provides. For others, however, an
important appeal is the opportunity to link the study of language and the mind to the
study of the brain.
In the 2000s regional and language-topical Cognitive Linguistics Associations,
affiliated to ICLA, began to emerge. Spain, Finland, and a Slavic-language CLA were
formed, and then Poland, Russia and Germany became the sites of newly affiliated
CLAs. These were followed by Korea, France, Japan, North America, the U.K.,
Sweden (which soon expanded to a Scandinavian association), and, most recently,
China and Belgium. Some of these associations existed prior to affiliation, while
others were formed specifically as regional affiliates.
Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last twenty-five years as a powerful
approach to the study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition, and a
general meaning construction.
Cognitive linguistics has emerged in the last twenty-five years as a powerful
approach to the study of language, conceptual systems, human cognition, and general
meaning construction.
It addresses within language the structuring of basic conceptual categories such as
space and time, scenes and events, entities and processes, motion and location, force
and causation. It addresses the structuring of ideational and affective categories
attributed to cognitive agents, such as attention and perspective, volition and
intention.
1
In doing so, it develops a rich conception of grammar that reflects
fundamental cognitive abilities: the ability to form structured conceptualizations with
multiple levels of organization, to conceive of a situation at varying levels of
abstraction, to establish correspondences between facets of different structures, and to
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