1. modern linguistics as a change of paradigms

Lecture 2: Introduction into Cognitive Linguistics
1. The concept of cognitive linguistics, tasks and research methods
2. The concept of the concept, concept sphere and conceptualization
3. The structure of the concept
Cognitive science arose on the basis of psychology. Prepared by the natural course of the development of science, it was born in 1956 at a symposium at the University of Massachusetts. Here, scientists theoretically substantiated the existence of science about the ways of perceiving, remembering, storing and using information.
Cognitive science combines psychology, neurophysiology, mathematics, logic, anthropology, linguistics and philosophy. Cognitive psychology arose as a reaction to an extremely simplified interpretation of human interaction with the world in American behaviorism. The description of the psyche and behavior on the principle of stimulus - reaction revealed a clear inadequacy.
Another extreme was the analysis of psychological phenomena based on introspection. The share of subjectivity was too high here. Cognitive scientists proposed objective analysis techniques and experimentally proved their effectiveness, which made cognitive science a leading trend in world psychology. Today, knowledge of cognitive processes is widely used in the evaluation of evidence (lie detector), in the development of computer programs.
Currently, within the framework of cognitive science, a model of a single linguistic-speech-thought process has been developed that solves the most complex theoretical problems: the ratio of language and speech in speech activity; the nature of the connection of thought and speech, personality and its speech; features of the formation of children's speech.
The emergence of cognitive linguistics was due to a change in the linguistic worldview in the late 1950s. The generative grammar of N. Chomsky with its central concept of the “deep structure” of the language introduced into the linguistics competence a theoretical construct inaccessible to direct observation.
The beginning of cognitive linguistics was laid by the works of the 70s - beginning of the 80s. Its institutionalization as a separate discipline occurred in 1989, when at a conference in Duisburg (Germany) it was decided to create an International Association of Cognitive Linguistics.
The dyad “language - man”, standard for anthropological linguistics, is split in cognitive linguistics into the triad “language - consciousness - man”. Cognitive linguistics explores the relationship between language and consciousness, the role of language in the conceptualization and categorization of the world. Cognitive science understands the language as one of the cognitive abilities of a person, along with non-linguistic forms of consciousness (mental representations). The subject of cognitive linguistics is language as a mechanism of cognition, as a system of signs that encodes and transforms information.
An almost iconic figure in modern cognitive science is George Lakoff , a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Lakoff began his scientific career as a follower of N. Chomsky, but subsequently moved from his transformational grammar to transformational semantics. According to the latter, utterance generators are not only syntactic structures, but also lexical semantics. Glory to Lakoff brought his theory of cognitive metaphor. The metaphor has traditionally been considered a linguistic construction and art path.
Lakoff, in collaboration with the philosopher M. Johnson, showed that metaphor is not only a means of creating an image, but also - no more no less - the main way of human thinking: “Our everyday conceptual system within which we think and act is essentially metaphorical” [398]. Whatever a person thinks, whatever means he tries to describe the state of things in the outside world or in his own soul, he always turns to his experience, already fixed in language.
As a result, it turns out that one reality is described through another: “The essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing the essence of one kind in terms of the essence of another kind” [399]. According to Lakoff, a metaphor in cognitive science is understood as a conceptual category and the most important mental operation for categorizing, conceptualizing, evaluating and explaining the world.
Metaphorization, and, in fact, the usual understanding of reality, is based on the following cognitive mechanism. In the general conceptual structure of consciousness, two particular structures — the source and the target (target) —are interacting.
As a result, some areas of the source structure are transferred to some areas of the target structure. A metaphorical projection (cognitive mapping) is carried out. Its results are called profiling the properties of the source in the target area. Profiling reveals the surface metaphorical semantics of a sentence or text. For example: After the crisis, our economy has taken the right course; Economic reforms are stalled; Economic life is not shaky or roll. Conceptual metaphor: ECONOMY is JOURNEY. Source: travel industry; the target is the scope of the economy.
In these examples, the economy is described as a journey associated with the risk of getting lost, stuck, delayed.
So, in a static sense, a conceptual metaphor is more or less stable correlations between the source and target structures. In the cognitive-procedural aspect, a conceptual metaphor can be defined as a way of mental projection from the source sphere to the target sphere. People think the way this is reflected in their speech. A means of representing and simultaneously detecting conceptual metaphors, i.e. mental operations, is a common linguistic metaphor.
Studies conducted on a large material of different languages ​​confirm the interconnected theses of the cognitive theory of metaphor: 1) metaphors influence thinking; 2) during social crises, the number of metaphors increases sharply (“crisis thinking”).
The most common spatial mental representations are called cognitive maps. Cognitive maps are human representations of the spatial organization of the world. Along with mental representations of time, cognitive maps are part of a single cognitive chronotope responsible for orientation in time and space. The process of dividing the information flow into concepts and their organization in consciousness is called conceptualization.
The whole set of concepts is formed into a conceptual system that serves as a navigator for a person, allowing him to interact adequately with the surrounding reality.
Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, a modern understanding of the concept as a unit of storage of human knowledge has formed.
The concept is “an operational informative unit of memory, mental lexicon, conceptual system and language of the brain (lingua mentalis), the whole picture of the world reflected in the human psyche” [400]. The concept is localized in the consciousness, which with its help implements the process of thinking. Sensory experience is continuous, i.e. doesn't have a break. A concept is a unit of quantization (division) of a continuous flow of information.
A concept is a generic concept for private mental representations - in fact, a concept, a frame (diagram), and a script. The term concept, used without reservation, means the concept itself. The creator of the frame theory is Marvin Minsky, an American specialist in the field of artificial intelligence (b. 1927). In his book “Frames for the Representation of Knowledge” (1974) [401], he displays two types of frames — the frame itself (static) and the script (dynamic frame). A frame is a structured mental information, a generalized diagram of an object or a situation that helps consciousness uniquely identify an object, relating it to a specific class of objects.
On the basis of frames, interpretation of indirect speech acts, hints, omissions, incomplete constructions, anecdotes, etc. In such cases, the addressee does not respond to the statement literally, but compares its content with its stereotypical scheme. The generalized image of the situation and its participants in the mind makes it possible to correctly understand the message. The presence of a frame allows you to complete the sensually unperceived part of the situation. If a student in the exam during the preparation very carefully looks at his lap, it is clear what he wants to see there.
A frame is usually represented as a hierarchical structure. It has a dominant node and a certain set of subordinate nodes - slots (eng. Slot ‘groove, hole’). Slot - an empty position of the "participants" of the situation. The “Exam” frame includes the following slots: teacher, student, tickets, audience, tables, chairs, etc. A filled slot is called a terminal.
The sequence of actions expected in a certain situation is fixed in the mind in the form of a script. The “Exam” scenario consists of the following micro events: a student enters the audience, takes a ticket, sits down to prepare, answers, gets an assessment, and leaves. In essence, a script is a frame in dynamics, in chronologically unfolded events. In a visual metaphorical form, a concept can be likened to a picture with one depicted object, a frame to a picture with several objects, and a script to a film.
Concepts as pre-linguistic mental representations stored in the memory during communication acquire the status of language, which actually makes them communicative. A word (a few words, a sentence, a text) is a linguistic representation of a concept. According to the characteristics of the word, one can judge the concept: “The cognitive approach to language is the belief that the linguistic form is ultimately a reflection of cognitive structures, that is, structures of human consciousness, thinking and cognition ”[402]. Some researchers believe that all concepts have a linguistic expression.Others allow the existence of non-verbalized concepts: "old-timer" - old-timer, but "new-born" – new-born.
The concept sphere is a non-verbalized thought field. Its units are concepts (actually concepts, frames, scripts). The semantic space of language is a verbalized part of the concept sphere. The specificity of semantic space of language indicates the specificity of the concept sphere.
The same concepts are embodied in different linguistic units (semantic keynotes): the intensifier magn ‘large’ is a component of many words and expressions - angelically, fabulously, scary, very, extremely; to get drunk - to the jail, like a shoemaker. Similar concepts of different languages ​​can be verbalized by semantically inequivalent words: the concept of “familiar”, ”знакомый” is expressed by the Russian word приятель ( friend) and English friend.
The term concept denotes different denotations in cognitive science and linguoculturology. In cognitive science and psycholinguistics, a concept is “a basic perceptual-cognitive-affective formation of a dynamic nature that spontaneously functions in the cognitive and communicative activities of an individual, which obeys the laws of a person’s mental life and, as a result, differs from concepts and meanings as products of a scientific description from the perspective of linguistic theory "[403].
A.A. Zalevskaya distinguishes a concept as a mental formation inherent in every person, and a scientific construct is the result of a description of concepts presented in the form of meaning (explanatory dictionary) and concept (encyclopedic dictionary). In cognitive science, the concept is expressed by the word, i.e. denotes one concept. The concept here is the mental reflection of any fragment of reality (the concept of “slipper”, hole ”,“ cold ”,“ blue ”).
In practical terms, a concept is a nationally, socially, and individually conditioned mental formation that captures a person’s personal experience and determines his attitude to a certain fragment of reality. The name of the subject refers the person not to a dictionary entry, but to a concept - to his own complex of representations and associations associated with this subject. It is the concept, and not the assessments gleaned from the encyclopedia, with which individual opinions often diverge, that determines the way of thinking and acting.
The concept of linguoculturalists recognize only the most significant entities that reflect national cultural values. The concept for a linguoculturologist is the mental basis of linguistic units and artifacts. In other words, a concept is a mental form of existence of linguistic and cultural phenomena. The concept is presented in the language and various fields of culture (secondary modeling systems). In linguistic terms, the linguoculturological concept has a field structure, i.e. expressed by several language units. This property of the concept of V.I. Karasik and G.G. Slyshkin is called polyapellability: “There are many ways of language appeal to any linguistic-cultural concept (“ inputs to the concept ”).
One and the same concept can be appealed with the help of language units of different levels: lexemes, phraseological units, free phrases, sentences. Non-verbal means can be used to appeal to certain concepts (for example, “beauty”, “love”, “money”). In different communicative contexts, one and the same unit can be an entrance to different concepts. The ways to appeal to the same concept in different cultures are usually different, and this is the main difficulty of intercultural communication ”[404].
In Russia in 2003, the public organization “Russian Association of Linguists-Cognitologists” (RALK) was registered. The Chairman of the Presidium of RALK became E.S. Kubryakova, President - N.N. Boldyrev. The journal of RALK is the journal Issues of Cognitive Linguistics.

One of the founders of cognitive linguistics is Leonard Talmy, a professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Buffalo, New York. He is studying the relationship between semantic and formal structures of the language, clarifying the relationship between semantic typologies and universals.

d) That has to be true.
(The arguments of reason overcome the tendency of fact to seem false.)
By analogy with the images-schemes of M. Johnson, dynamic-force schemes are models with the help of which the language describes the interaction of objects (entities) in a wide variety of conceptual areas.
Although L. Talmi mentions the fact that the force interaction of real spatially oriented objects and representations from “naive physics” can be metaphorically “extended” to other areas (the so-called metaphoric extension), the main postulate of his theory lies in the fact that force interaction is a fundamental conceptual system in a language, with the help of which autonomous conceptual structuring of most conceptual areas is carried out.
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