The nature of the mind is such that thoughts arise irrespective of any conscious effort from an individual and remain present in the mind at all times if the mind is conscious. Through language, human beings decrease the emotional burden of thoughts by effectively expressing these thoughts and communicating them with the rest of the world.
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens) represents cognitive linguistics as an approach to the analysis of natural language focusing on language as an instrument for organizing, processing, and conveying information. This kind of study originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the work of George Lakoff, Ron Langacker, and Len Talmy. Cognitive linguistics is interested in knowledge through language.
The development of cognitive abilities also enable human beings to better understand complicated structures of natural language. Cognitivists compare their approach to language teaching with that of generativists who consider language to be wholly a set of rules formulated to generate an infinite number of possible sentences. The contrast is that cognitivism gives primacy to semantics. For cognitive linguists, our interactions with the world are mediated by structures of information in the mind. Isn't that fascinating?
Language is the foundation of literature. Meaning is an important philosophical problem in literary theory. According to Geoffery Leech, there are seven types of meaning, namely conceptual, connotative, collocative, reflective, affective, social, and thematic. But how does language help human beings derive that sense of meaning? The study of meaning is commonly known as semantics and is an essential aspect of studying language. It can be said that human beings use language to derive meaning. So, what is the relationship between language and meaning? Is meaning created in thought or in text? To be able to create meaning a language has to consist ultimately of logical words, which function as subjects, verbs, and objects, and non-logical words, which give logical words either particular or universal reference. But, what happens to the nature of meaning when language is used to construct discourse around phenomena? What is the relevance of reference in the analysis of discourse?
Discourse is different from speech acts of language in that discourse interprets and contextualizes knowledge through processes of socialization. A trait of word formation processes or derivational morphology is that words of a language can have their roots in another language. Some English words have Greek or Latin roots. Similarly, some English words have Arabic, French, German, or Japanese roots because these languages once came in contact. Semantics is considered to be the foremost component of cognitive linguistics. Semantics is also one of the main ingredients of studying text. As globalization unfolds, the effects of inter-cultural interactions are becoming central to educationists who believe that through teaching foreign languages better inter-cultural communication can be established. Undoubtedly, world literatures also play an important role in the development of this socio-cultural competence at educational institutions.
Inflection is the linguistic process through which words change their form according to constructs of time, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy (how alive the referent of a noun is), and definiteness. These linguistic categories ensure words change their form to function according to the needs of the discourse which eventually aspires to refer to something meaningful.
That is to say, sociocultural contexts hold meaning and natural language refers to meaning by making use of non-logical words. Logical words derive their meaning based on the rhetoric non-logical words create. Willem A Devries in the paper Hegel on Reference and Knowledge writes about Russell, who "between 1905 and 1913 (or later) never shook the idea that for non-logical terms meaning was, in the last analysis, reference."
(Source: EFLU, Hyderabad)
Lexical cohesion devices or grammatical cohesion devices are indicators of the meaning intended by a discourse. Cohesion devices are dependent on context. The reason why the meaning of a text changes when read by different readers, even if the non-logical words, that refer to a meaning, remain unchanged, is because sociocultural contexts change. While reading our brains continuously attempt to make meaning. Our brains make meaning by first noticing and then understanding the relations between cohesive devices and the sentences where they appear. Our brain deconstructs the meaning of a text by studying the coherence of patterns and the rhetoric given to a text by concepts such as non-logical words or cohesive devices. Cohesive devices are an important part of the study of meaning in the field of language.
So, the dichotomy remains whether it is the internal structures of language that help human beings derive meaning, or, is it the experience of living in a society and the study of sociocultural processes that help human beings refer to and develop meaning through language.
In the paper titled Style, Peter Verdonk emphasizes that "tropes and schemes, and figures of thought, are no rhetorical byproducts of a process of objective thinking of an independent mind; rather, they are a reflection of how people construe their knowledge and experience of the world around them." Verdonk's understanding of this concept is classical in nature and Aristotelian to be exact. From this point of view, the audience plays no role in the process of meaning production. Verdonk explains that throughout history rhetoric has changed with changes in government, politics, law, education, and the production and reception of the arts – in brief, with the changes in the overall social, ideological, and cultural situation. Style is one among the five canons of rhetoric. The five divisions are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Verdonk also writes that even for Aristotle "the main virtues of style are clarity and appropriateness (III.II.2; the latter is repeated in III.VII.2–11)" and that, "In later chapters of his book, Aristotle adds, among others, the requirements of purity or grammatical correctness (III.V.5–7), rhythm (III.VIII), and ornamentation (III.X–XI). Thinking, imagination, learning, memory, perception, attention, emotion, reasoning, and problem-solving are cognitive abilities associated with human consciousness and cognitive linguists hold that there is a close interactive and meaningful relationship between them and linguistic ability. "One of the valuable spinoffs from cognitive linguistic research is cognitive stylistics, also called cognitive poetics. It is an interdisciplinary study of how readers process literary texts, or perhaps better still, of what happens when a reader reads a literary text’ (Stockwell, 2002: 5)" (Verdonk, Style: 2006)
It is becoming clearer that language serves the function of creating signs that are socially accepted. However, the foremost trait of structural linguistics is that signs are arbitrary, and only signified in society with mutual agreement between individuals. "Discourse is then no longer the mere application of grammatical rules, but the grammatical rules themselves are motivated by the discourse functions that the grammar has to fulfill." (Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics)
Now, it has to be said that with the use of literary techniques and rhetoric, writers arrive at a style that can be identified as their own. By knowing what makes their style unique they can further give their text the meaning they really intend. Different linguistic items modify the structure and meaning of a text differently. To understand the grammatical use of linguistic items it is essential to first know the science of categorization of linguistic items even though the study of language is shrouded with a dichotomy between 'form' and 'function'.
Works Cited:
---. “Introducing Cognitive Linguistics.” Oxford University Press eBooks, 2010, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199738632.013.0001.
Hi, this was interesting and perhaps will be revisited at a later time. I'm not sure how or if all these pieces fit together. Some certainly do in my opinion, such as those of style and rhetoric. But I'm not sure how morphology and languages coming in contact tie in with semantics. Just a few thoughts I had. Keep writing!
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