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Course Description:
• How do verb-particle combinations become phrasal verbs?
• Why are metaphors so popular in everyday language?
• How does “connotation” work?
• What is the “best” green? Does color perception change with cultural background?
• How could you visualize “Game over”?
• Where is the border between “concrete” and “figurative” meaning?
• How do you use a cognitive approach in language teaching?
In the 1980s, cognitive linguistics developed as a reaction to new advances in psychology that challenged many of the basic concepts of structuralist linguistics. Instead of trying to explain meaning in terms of internal relations between language components, cognitive semantics attempts to form categories of meaning by looking at similarities across structural boundaries. In this process, prototypes and metaphors are important. Prototypes identify central features of categories and act as reference points. Thus, they are useful in complementing structuralist features, for example in lexical semantics. Metaphors have, arguably, been neglected in traditional research. In contrast, cognitive linguists see them as a basic and fundamental process for organizing knowledge (and one of the main reasons for language change).
In this block seminar, we’ll look more closely at the proponents, central features and ideas of the cognitive linguistic approach, such as construction of meaning, representation of knowledge and prototype theory. We’ll also discuss new trends in the field and examine the differences between structuralist and cognitive linguistics and the criticism they direct at each other. Can the two work together in explaining meaning? In the second part of the seminar, cognitive linguistic theory will be put to the test, using computer corpora, questionnaires and other polling techniques. Participants will also investigate innovative ways to use the cognitive approach, for example in historical linguistics and applied fields, such as language teaching.
During the semester, students will also perform hands-on research by recording and transcribing conversations in the context of our Corpus of Academic Spoken English (CASE) corpus. The transcript will also count towards course credit. For detailed course requirements please also consult the respective module descriptions. |
