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There are a number of reasons why cognitive linguistics has developed, not the least of them being the dissatisfaction of certain linguists with the theory of generative grammar, mainly connected to the work by CHOMSKY, which was overwhelmingly popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The generative theory located the field of linguistics close to the natural sciences and gave syntax the highest priority, thus partly disregarding and also somewhat discriminating against semantics. In generative linguistics, grammar is seen as the set of principles by which a language works (cf. BROCCIAS 2006: 81). ‘The well-formed sentence’ and ‘the ideal speaker’ are important notions in generative grammar – the problem is just that in everyday life, there are hardly any ideal speakers using only well-formed sentences. Instead, language use is influenced by countless non-linguistic factors, among them the speech situation, the speaker’s intention, his/her educational, regional and social background, gender and age, culture, to name just a few of the numerous influences. Simplifying somewhat, generative linguistics tries to look at ‘language proper’, devoid of all the influence factors just mentioned, and at the linguistic system rather than at actual speech performance. It furthermore believes that language is not directly related to other cognitive faculties that humans possess, such as their experiences, their memory, their senses, their senso-motor systems, their vision as well as other factors related to cognition. The hypothesised language component in people’s brains is seen as autonomous and as rather independent of all the factors enumerated above.

As mentioned before, researchers began to become dissatisfied with the explanations of language and grammar that generative linguistics had to offer and at a certain point in time (the mid- to late 1970s) began to look for alternative explanations of language. Today, many researchers within the field of cognitive linguistics see the publication of LAKOFF/JOHNSON’s seminal work “Metaphors we live by” (1980) as the starting point of cognitive linguistics. In this publication, LAKOFF, a linguist, and JOHNSON, a philosopher, analyse so-called conceptual metaphors1 that appear in everyday language.

For example, when somebody says that s/he was “on my way to fame”, but recently “hit a dead-end street” and has to find out “how to go on”, this person is speaking about their way in life by using metaphorical linguistic expressions belonging to the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY2. This metaphor borrows terms from the concrete word-field of ‘journey’ and uses them for the abstract concept of ‘life’, because there are no words that are unique to ‘life’. LIFE IS A JOURNEY is actually a very common metaphor, especially in Judeo-Christian cultures, as, for example, already the Bible speaks about good and evil ways in life. A life is of course not a journey in the concrete sense of the word, but people use this metaphor quite frequently in order to speak about the abstract phenomenon of life. What is more, this metaphor is normally not used consciously, but people’s concepts and thought systems are subconsciously structured according to this metaphor3. The main function of conceptual metaphors then is to make abstract concepts more graspable and more concrete and thus to provide understanding.

In the wake of LAKOFF/JOHNSON’s 1980 publication, metaphor theory has been lured away from the realm of literature analysis and the two authors have proven that people do not only speak in metaphors in literary texts but also – and especially so – in their everyday language, and that, furthermore, people think in metaphors. Metaphor is thus not only seen as a matter of language but more generally as a matter of cognition and additionally as a matter of culture, as most metaphors can be seen as culture-dependent. This line of thought focuses on the connection between language, cognition and culture that the generativists had completely disregarded.

At about the same time when LAKOFF/JOHNSON worked on their conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), TALMY developed his theory on force dynamics4, claiming that what people know about forces in the world – for example people’s understanding of gravity or of motion along a path – is also to be found in their language use, i.e., TALMY tried to integrate encyclopaedic everyday knowledge into research on language. Such foundational schemas give structure to the understanding of many other domains of experience. For instance, when somebody says “You may enter” this person gives permission and thus takes away the potential obstacle of “no permission to enter”, so that passing through an entrance becomes possible. This can be interpreted in the sense of physical forces – if a barrier is lifted, the way is open and if the barrier is not lifted, it is known from everyday experience that the way is blocked. It becomes obvious that also in this part of cognitive linguistic theory human everyday experience is tapped into.

The third area of cognitive linguistics that was developed around the same time as the two approaches just mentioned was LANGACKER’s version of cognitive grammar5 (see, for example, LANGACKER 2006; LANGACKER 2013). In his grammatical analyses of English, LANGACKER started to prioritise meaning, i.e., the semantic aspects of language, instead of syntax, as the generativists had done. For LANGACKER, grammar is as meaningful as lexis, just in a more abstract way. Therefore, every grammatical construction carries meaning, and language users normally have the choice between different construals, i.e., different ways of grammatically structuring an utterance. This does not only entail a choice between different linguistic constructions but at the same time it entails a choice of perspective. Speakers normally select that construction and that perspective which make it easy for their interlocutor(s) to understand what they want them to understand.

The process of selecting a specific construal happens for nearly every utterance, because speakers are relatively free to describe a given event or situation in different ways, depending on what exactly they want to express. At the same time, this means that speakers’ conceptualizations are inherently subjective. An example for this subjectivity is the choice between the active voice and the passive voice: “Peter analysed an example sentence” refers to the same situation as “the example sentence was analysed (by Peter)”, but describes this situation in a different way. Whereas in the active sentence “Peter” is important as the agent who performed the analysis, in the passive sentence “the example sentence” is more important and the person who performed the analysis is of minor importance and can even be omitted. This can be imagined as placing a spotlight on the most important participant in the situation described and the move from the active voice to the passive voice includes moving the spotlight. In this way, the choice of the active voice vs. the passive voice mirrors the language user’s perspective on the given situation and shows what is important for him/her or what s/he wants others to understand6.

As cognitive grammar is the topic of the following sub-chapter, it is presented and discussed in more detail there. As it is furthermore the basis for all the case studies in the second part of this book, it is revisited in every single case study, where the underlying meaning of the grammatical phenomenon in question is explained from a cognitive-grammar perspective for each case study.

It may have become obvious that cognitive linguistics, which sees itself as a humanistic approach to language, has its origins not in a single new approach but refers to a multitude of approaches which share similar basic beliefs, some of which developed at around the same time, all of them in the USA, but at different places. One can assume that the dissatisfaction with the ruling generative paradigm became so overwhelming that researchers from different linguistic fields reacted by developing and presenting theories that contradicted much of what generative linguistics sees as its basic assumptions. This is also why GEERAERTS (2006: 2) calls cognitive linguistics a “flexible framework rather than a single theory of language”.

In complete contrast to generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics “sees language as an instrument for organizing, processing, and conveying information – as something primarily semantic, in other words” (GEERAERTS 2006: 3). This quote highlights the fact that cognitive linguistics is first and foremost interested in meaning, which it sees as “not just an objective reflection of the outside world” (ibid.: 4) but as “a way of shaping that world” (ibid.). As GEERAERTS (ibid.: 5) stresses, “linguistic meaning is not separate from other forms of knowledge of the world that we have, and in that sense it is encyclopaedic and non-autonomous: it involves knowledge of the world that is integrated with our other cognitive capacities”. Therefore, cognitive linguistics is interested in human cognitive processing and sees cognition as the key to the explanation of language structure, language acquisition (relating to both the first language as well as to further languages) and language use. It assumes that human language reflects people’s experiences within a given culture, which help them to conceptualise the world, and that explanations for linguistic phenomena are frequently inseparably intertwined with these experiences, be they physical or sociocultural7.

Language is therefore considered to be a reflection of human cognition and conceptualization. Cognitive linguistics holds that people do not have direct access to an objective, external reality (cf., for example, EVANS/GREEN 2006: 47), but can only access their subjective and anthropomorphic conceptualizations directly. The linguistic representation of an event is then based on the conceptualization that the event evokes in a language user or that the language user chooses to adopt.