12th Feb, 2020
Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences
Discussion
Started 9th Nov, 2019
Autonomous linguistics vs cognitive linguistics
Grammar, syntax, and morphology can be seen as autonomous levels of language development from other cognitive domains or language is part of various cognitive nonlinguistic features such as auditory perception, general intelligence, hierarchical structuring abilities? So, language is embedded in more general cognitive abilities?
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11th Nov, 2019
This is actually the bone of contention between Chomskyian formal linguistics and cognitive linguistics. According to the cognitive approach to language, the latter is not an autonomous system but one of our cognitive abilities on a par with perception, attention, memory, metaphor, scanning, etc., whereby a full understanding of language is accountable only with reference to all other cognitive abilities.
thank you Maalej for your contribution. As an SLP I am wondering how a linguist based on some results from language disorders can argue for a dissociation between perception and language or auditory skills and language..is there any new data supporting the "autonomous" side? maybe from stroke patients? or DLD? how can we dissociate auditory skills from speech production?
thank you Ali, I have seen already many opinions based on "autonomous" perspective...I would like to see new evidence from both aspects
So, language is embedded in more general cognitive abilities? In Memory, definitely. I read once that Chinese aphasic patients showed no impairing on their Chinese characters recognizing abilities than westeners, whose speech skills were impaired. Sorry for not being able to provide you the source. Try "googling:" Chinese aphasic patients no impairing.
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I should say that (the faculty of)language is part of the cognitive aparatus and that morphologies are part of the local cultures. Added to this is the fact that the development of the speakers acts as an interface between (biologically based) cognition and languages-based-socialisation.
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Thank you Abdou. The other side states language is autonomous from nonlinguistic systems. Scientists like Pinker, Chomsky argue (still?) for a generative view of the language faculty. Some papers from different types of dysphasia argue that children with language disorders have problems with "constructing morphological paradigms in the lexicon"...
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Yes, but they consider that (the faculty of) language is syntactically pre-structured, so to say, whereas this part of the activity is plainly neural. Languages disorders come mainly from the (final) motor part of the activity: when biology meets culture, precisely!
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However, language functions in the brain are neurologically distinct (Left Hemisphere) for the great majority of folks, ~85% of the population. More bilaterally distributed for Left handers and females
Ronnie, indeed but LH is not the only area related...the relation between language and brain is more than LH function
"The difficulties in learning a language and comprehending and expressing speech, as well as the developmental delay in metacognitive processes such as problem solving and attention, decreases these children’s ability to create and maintain social communication with their peers" (Martin et al., 2011).
So, how the possible difficulties in learning language, comprehending and expressing speech....are all autonomous from cognitive skills, a statement that Pinker, Clahsen etc argue?
Several months late, but I hope to be able to meaningfully contribute a little more of the CL perspective to this discussion.
This debate probably goes back to the "lingustics wars" of the 1960s at MIT (there's a book written by Randy Harris on that subject).
The gist of the "wars" was that some MIT linguists were dissatisfied with how the Chomskyan generative paradigm mostly relied on semantic theories
which postulate some kind of autonomous semantic interpretation system through which syntactic inputs were fed as inputs (see Heim & Kratzer, pp. 43-45). These linguists proposed a new paradigm called Generative Semantics (GS), which argued that these transformations of inputs affected meaning.
GS eventually evolved into Cognitive Linguistics (CL). Importantly, GS saw meaning as included in the deep structures of the language faculty, and the fundamentality of meaning is inherited in CL.
For example, in Langacker's theory of Cognitive Grammar (CG), he claims grammar to "inherently symbolic". Meanwhile, in Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), it is proposed that metaphor is not limited to language use and linguistic structures but pervades across cognition. So, the lines between linguistic cognitive processes and other facets of our cognition are blurred.
These are some of the ways in which "cognitive holisticism"(?) emerged and are maintained in CL, as opposed to the autonomous modularity of generativism.
Heim & Kratzer (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci2952d/readings/lecture3-heim-kratzer.pdf
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