Cognitive Linguistics Essay

Chapter 1: Introduction

Cognitive Linguistics is a relatively new branch of linguistics which has been recently developed for about a few decades. Though still young, the field has attracted the attention of many gurus as well as offered many interesting and valuable views related to crucial matters, such as how humans perceive the world, factors affecting language use, and the use of language under the same language norms to convey non-objective meaning which is the most significant. Among the studied objects, cognitive linguistics closely pays attention to the nature categorization and categories, which are the key to most basic cognitive process. Coincidently, not only in this field that such matters are debatable. For a long time, the field

In fact, “a word gets its significant by being connected to a concept or a coherent structure in our conceptual representation of the world” (Murphy, 2002, pp. 288-289). We perceive the world and reality with our body and senses, then turn those experiences into concept. The term concept is defined as an mental embodiment of a thing which has been experienced through human senses and bodily experiences. The concept is stored in human’s mind to categorize things and phenomena of the world. In other words, categorization is a process in which various phenomena are sorted out into different groups, basing on certain (sometimes vague) kinds of

They point out that learning L2 vocabulary through reading is not an ideal way as “the integration of a word within a text is not sufficient to understand reality the concept covers and the contexts in which the lexical item may appear” (Cornu, 1979, p.263). L2 learners may not be able to “‘produce’ [words] in the appropriate context, to discriminate among synonyms…to distinguish between various shades and levels of meaning” (Maiguashca, 1984, p.276). Indeed, Channell (1981) gave out a list of common lexical errors often made by ESL