Key points of Introduction

Key points of Introduction
The Introduction can be divided up into two parts:
1. The cognitive linguistics and the three main approaches (the
experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view of
language).
2. The brief introduction of the six chapters of the book.
The first part goes like this:
The traditional Chinese story ‘The blind and the elephant’ tells us that
people have different targets will have different approaches. Take the
sentence ‘Our car has broken down’ for example, common people will
feel sorry. For the linguist, this sentence will be different. In traditional
description, the linguists will focus on grammatical structures and word
meanings .While modern linguists would like to establish a body of
logical rules for generating the sentences of a language that are
grammatically correct and semantically acceptable. But for cognitive
linguists, language is of a mental nature. The mental process involved in
knowing, learning and understanding things. They adopt the assumption
that language reflects patterns of thought.
• Cognitive linguistics, as presented in this book , is an approach to
language that is based on our experience of the world and the way
we perceive and conceptualize it.(Ungerer﹠Schmid:introduction)
• To study language from the cognitive perspective is to study
patterns of conceptualization.(Evans & Green: 5)
As we understand the term, cognitive linguistics is today represented
by three main approaches: the experiential view, the prominence view
and the attentional view of language.
To begin with the experiential view, its main claim is that instead of
postulating logical rules and objective definitions on the basis of
theoretical considerations and introspection, a more practical and
empirical path should be pursued. For example, one can ask language
users to describe what is going on in their minds when they produce and
understand words and sentences. And the experiential view of words
seems to be superior to the logical view because it provides a much richer
and more natural description of their meanings. Metaphor is important to
understand the abstract categories. Like the sentence ‘Our car has broken
down.’ we can use our knowledge of chairs or other equally familiar
objects collapsing to understand what happens when the car’s engine
suddenly stops working. This transfer makes our understanding easy.
Another approach is the prominence view which provides one
explanation of how the information in a clause is selected and arranged.
For example consider the sentence The car crashed into the tree which
might be a description of the circumstances that led to the car’s
breakdown. In comparison, other ways of relating the accident such as
The tree was hit by the car seem somehow strange and unnatural. The
reason is that the moving car is the most interesting and prominent aspect
of the whole situation and the clause subject is determined by the
different degrees of prominence carried by the elements involved in a
situation.
The third approach is attentional view which is based on the
assumption that what we actually express reflects which parts of an event
attract our attention. And the prominence and attention allocation seem to
be no less relevant for syntactic analysis than the rule- based description
of logical grammar.
The second part of the introduction is the brief introduction of the six
chapters of the book. I will talk about it in the following notes.