认知语言学入门读书报告

Reading Report on An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics

An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, written by Ungerer and Schmid is an explanatory book for those who start to access to cognitive linguistics. In this book, the authors rate cognitive linguistics as a tool for the study of linguistics. From their standpoint, cognitive linguistics mainly adopts three methods as its representation, namely experiential view, prominence view, and attentional view. As for the experiential view, it means that language use is not identical with the description of the objective world, in the meantime, body experience should be embedded. Then the prominence view, it deems that the arrangement of information in sentence structure is determined by its prominence degree, which, needless to say, is linked to subject s’willingness. Finally, the attentional view, it indicates that what we express in a situation is the part that attracts our attention most.

The whole book can roughly be divided into five parts. The first part embraces from unit one to unit three. Unit four is the second part , and unit five is the third part, respectively represented by the above three views. Unit six is the fourth part about blending and relevance. Unit seven is the fifth part about other issues in cognitive linguistics. Now, I will make a brief introduction on each part as follows: Chapter one is prototypes and category. It includes three parts. The first part is early empirical research into lexical categories, which begin with the category of color conducted by Rosch. Based on empirical research, Rosch comes to a conclusion that focal colors are perceptually more salient than non-focal colors, focal colors are more accurately remembered in short-term memory and more easily retained in long-term memory, and the names of focal colors are more rapidly produced in color-naming tasks and are acquired earlier by children. Inspired by this research, Rosch expands his research into squares, birds, cups, and events domains, which come to a similar conclusion. Based on these researches, he proposes the notion of prototype, which is the main topic of the second part of unit one. Prototype, from the intuitive view, is the good example of a certain category, while more often than not, it is defined as a member has the most attributes in a category. Prototype plays a crucial role in categorization, it acts as a cognitive reference point, which is indicative of its function of forming the internal structure of a category. Also, there is no denying that family resemblance is significant in the formation of category. When speaking of category, a clear distinction should be made between cognitive category and classic category. In contrast with classic category theory, cognitive category theory claims that, first, there exists a prototype in a category, and each member occupies different status in the category. Second, unlike classic category theory, which takes a common feature as the necessary and sufficient condition, the cognitive category theory adopts family resemblance as its criteria. Third, cognitive category theory thinks that the boundary between categories is fuzzy, which means that a member can belong to two categories in some condition, for example, tomato belong to both vegetable and fruit. With regard to the third part, it is about context-dependence and cultural models which is an expanse of the notion of prototype. As is known to all, our life is inseparable from the world, and people from different regions or countries must have their own cultural and social knowledge. So the prototype is not fixed, and it may