M. Iriskulov, A. Kuldashev a course in Theoretical English Grammar Tashkent 2008

II. Traditional and cognitive understanding of syntax. 
The traditional, or systemic approach in Grammar, centers around the 
description of structural properties of linguistic units and their meanings, as they 
are represented in the system of language without considering the process of 
utterance-formation, i.e. it doesn’t envisage the general (cognitive and linguistic) 
mechanisms which enable us to shape the conceptual content into a sentence and 
what’s more important to structure the exact sentence we want, corresponding to 
our pragmatic intention (for example, what’s the difference between the following 
pairs of sentences, if any at all: 
Bill sent a walrus to Joyce. Bill sent Joyce a walrus; 
Buzzing, the car went down the road. The car buzzed down the road. 

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63 
To find the answers seems possible within a cognitive approach, the approach 
which was started in the second half of the 20
th
century and since then has been 
greatly promoted by foreign linguists such as G.Lakoff, R.Jackendoff, R. 
Langacker, L.Talmy, J.R. Taylor, A.Wierzbicka and others. 
Cognitive linguistics appeared within a framework of approaches to the 
analysis of language, which are the formal, the psychological, and the conceptual. 
The formal approach addresses the linguistic patterns, abstracted away from any 
associated meaning. Thus, this approach includes the study of morphological, 
syntactic, lexical structure. Traditional generative grammar has centered itself 
within this approach. The psychological approach looks at language from the 
perspective of general cognitive systems, within this approach language is 
examined from the perspective of perception, memory, attention, reasoning. The 
main target of the conceptual approach is to consider the global system of 
schematic structures with which language organizes conceptual content that it 
expresses.
Cognitive approach is concerned with the patterns in which and the processes 
by which conceptual content is organized in language, or, in other words, how 
language structures conceptual content. Cognitive linguistics studies how language 
structures such basic conceptual categories as those of space and time, scenes and 
events, entities and properties, motion and location, force and causation. It 
considers the semantic structure of morphological and lexical forms as well as that 
of syntactic patterns. Cognitive linguistics considers language a cognitive system,
which along with other cognitive systems, such as perception, attention, reasoning, 
affect, memory, motor control comprises human cognition. In this respect language 
appears to have some structural properties common to other cognitive systems.
The investigation of linguistic means in cognitive aspect, that is examining of 
meaning-form mappings (картирование, отображение) is based on the recent 
findings of psychology: such as the prototypical principle of category structure, the 
principle of figure-ground segregation (выделение фигуры и фона), “windowing”
of attention (распределение внимания) and some others. Let’s consider each of 
them.