Classical vs. Modern theory in cognitive linguistics

As presented above, the Chomskyan predilection for a genetic perspective in linguistics follows from his lack of interest for the social side of language. But in actual historical fact, Chomsky's preference for a genetic conception of language seems to have grown more from his discussion with behaviorist learning theory Skinner in particular than from a confrontation with Saussure. Because the amazing ability of young children to acquire language cannot be explained on the basis of a stimulus-response theory—so the argument goes—an innate knowledge of language has to be assumed.

But if one of the major features of language is its genetic nature, then of course the social aspects of language are epiphenomenal. Regardless of the direction in which the link is construed, however, the effects are clear. Second, if natural language is primarily a genetic entity, semantics or the lexicon cannot be part of the core of linguistics. Meanings constitute the variable, contextual, cultural aspects of language par excellence. Because social interaction, the exchange of ideas, and changing conceptions of the world are primarily mediated through the meaning of linguistic expressions, it is unlikely that the universal aspects of language will be found in the realm of meaning.

Further, if the lexicon is the main repository of linguistically encoded meaning, studying the lexicon is of secondary importance. Here as before, though, it should be pointed out that the actual historical development is less straightforward than the reconstruction might suggest.

The desemanticization of the grammar did not happen at once nor was it absolute, for that matter. The answer that Chomsky ultimately favored implied a restrictive stance with regard to the introduction of meaning into the grammar, but this position was certainly not reached in one step; it was prepared by severe debates in the generativist community.

Third, if semantics or the lexicon cannot be part of the core of linguistics, linguistics will focus on formal rule systems. The preference for formal syntax that characterizes Generative Grammar follows by elimination from its genetic orientation: It should be added that the focus on rules is not only determined by a negative attitude with regard to meanings, but also by a focus on the infinity of language: Finally, if linguistics focuses on formal rule systems, the application of the rule systems in actual usage is relatively uninteresting.

If the rules define the grammar, it is hard to see what added value could be derived from studying the way in which the rules are actually put to use. The study of performance, in other words, is just as secondary as research into the lexicon. It embodies a restrictive strategy that separates the autonomous grammatical module from different forms of context.

Classical vs. Modern theory in cognitive linguistics

Without further consideration of the interrelationship between the various aspects of the decontextualizing drift, the main effects can be summarized as follows:. None of the approaches mentioned here, however, overcomes the autonomist restrictions in any fundamental sense. Sociolinguistics and pragmatics exist alongside grammatical theory rather than interacting with it intensively, and the conception of meaning that lies at the basis of formal semantics is too restricted to consider it a truly recontextualized grammar.

In other words, the recuperation of the contextual aspects rejected by Generative Grammar could go further, and this is exactly what is happening in a number of contemporary trends in linguistics. From roughly onwards, in fact, a number of trends in linguistics appear to link the grammar more closely to the contextual aspects that were severed from it by generative theorizing.

The peripheral aspects that were being developed largely separately and autonomously are now being linked up more narrowly with the grammar itself which can then no longer be autonomous. When we have a look at the relevant developments, we will see that Cognitive Linguistics plays a role in each of them. First, the reintroduction of the lexicon into the grammar is probably the most widespread of the tendencies to be mentioned here; it is, in fact, relatively clear within Generative Grammar itself.

This lexicalist tendency in grammatical theory is triggered by the recognition that describing grammatical rules appears to imply describing the lexical sets that the rules apply to. Reversing the descriptive perspective then leads to a description of the valence of the lexical items i. The lexicalist tendency appears in various p.

In the context of Cognitive Linguistics, the relexification of the grammar is most outspoken in Construction Grammar Goldberg ; Croft , which starts from the recognition that there is a continuum between syntax and lexicon: Second, Cognitive Linguistics at large is the most outspoken current attempt to give meaning a central position in the architecture of the grammar.

In contrast with formal semantics, however, the conception of meaning that lies at the basis of this approach is not restricted to a referential, truth-functional type of meaning. Linguistic structures are thought to express conceptualizations, that is, conceptualization is central for linguistic structure—and conceptualization goes further than mere reference. It involves imagery in the broadest sense of the word: Also, the conceptualizations that are expressed in the language have an experiential basis, that is, they link up with the way in which human beings experience reality, both culturally and physiologically.

In this sense, Cognitive Linguistics embodies a fully contextualized conception of meaning. Again, there are other approaches that develop a meaning-based approach to grammar, like Hallidayan Systemic-Functional Grammar, but Cognitive Linguistics is undoubtedly the most outspoken example of this tendency. And third, the link between linguistic performance and grammar is reestablished by those functionalist approaches that try to find potentially universal discourse motivations for grammatical constructs.

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. The existence of passives in a given language, for instance, is then explained as a topicalization mechanism: In the realm of Cognitive Linguistics, this tendency takes the form of an insistence on the idea that Cognitive Linguistics is a usage-based model of language as it is aptly called by Barlow and Kemmer Importantly, the model is also applied to language acquisition.

Specifically in the work done by Tomasello and his group see this volume, chapter 41 , an alternative is presented for the Chomskyan genetic argument. These researchers develop a model of language acquisition in which each successive stage is co determined by the actual knowledge and use of the child at a given stage, that is, language acquisition is described as a series of step-by-step usage-based extensions of the child's grammar.

The grammar so to speak emerges from the child's interactive performance. Finally, language use is becoming an increasingly important factor in grammatical change, witness Traugott's studies on the role of speaker-hearer interaction in grammaticalization; Croft's usage-based theory of language change and grammatical change, in particular ; and Bybee's and Krug's work on such usage-based factors as entrenchment and frequency in grammatical change. To conclude, if we can agree that contemporary linguistics embodies a tendency a cluster of tendencies, to be more precise toward the recontextualization of linguistic enquiry, we may also agree that Cognitive Linguistics embodies this trend to an extent that probably no other theoretical movement does.

It embodies the resemanticization of grammar by focusing on the interplay between language and conceptualization. It embodies the recovery of the lexicon as a relevant structural level by developing network models of grammatical structure, like Construction Grammar. And it embodies the discursive turn of contemporary linguistics by insisting explicitly on the usage-based nature of linguistics.

Other approaches may develop each of these tendencies separately in more detail than Cognitive Linguistics does, but it is the latter movement that combines them most explicitly and so epitomizes the characteristic underlying drift and drive of present-day linguistics. We would like to suggest, in short, that it is this feature that constitutes one of the fundamental reasons behind the success of Cognitive Linguistics.

The recognition that Cognitive Linguistics is not a closed or finished doctrine implies, obviously, that there is room for further developments. The contributions brought together in this Handbook not only give an idea of the achievements of Cognitive Linguistics, but they also point to a number of underlying issues that are likely to shape the further elaboration of Cognitive Linguistics. Three issues that we would like to highlight are the following.

Readers will have noticed that a fourth type of context mentioned in our description of the decontextualizing tendencies of twentieth-century linguistics was absent from our overview of recontextualizing tendencies that apply to Cognitive Linguistics. This emphasis on the social aspects of language , however, will have to be turned into a an actual research program exploring social cognition and sociovariational p.

If Cognitive Linguistics develops an interest in language as a social phenomenon, it should pay more attention to language-internal variation. Socio-linguistic research, however, is probably the least developed of all linguistic domains within Cognitive Linguistics. Recently, though, we witness some developments toward cognitive sociolinguistics. For one thing, variational phenomena are being studied empirically in work such as Kristiansen on phonetic variation, Berthele on differences in syntactic construal between dialects, and Grondelaers on grammatical phenomena whose distribution is determined by a combination of internal structural or semantic and external contextual or sociolinguistic factors.

More examples may be found in Kristiansen and Dirven Usage-based and meaning-based models of grammar in fact introduce more variation into the grammar than a rule-based approach tends to do: Disentangling those different factors, then, becomes one methodological endeavor: For another, there is an interest in cultural models and the way in which they may compete within a community: In work such as Lakoff , this approach takes on a critical aspect that brings it close to the tradition of ideological analysis known as Critical Discourse Analysis.

Some researchers are applying the theory of conceptual metaphors and cultural models to questions of social identity and the role language plays in them: It has recently been pointed out Berthele ; Geeraerts that such metaphorical models may also characterize the beliefs that language users entertain regarding language and language varieties.

In this way, Cognitive Linguistics may link up with existing sociolinguistic research about language attitudes. These developments show that the interest in sociovariational analysis in Cognitive Linguistics is on the rise, but at the same time, it has to be recognized that the final contextual gap that we discussed in the previous section still has to be filled properly. If we understand empirical methods to refer to forms of research like corpus linguistics, experimentation, and neurological modeling that do not rely on introspection and intuition but that try to ground linguistic analysis on the firm basis of objective observation, then we can certainly witness a growing appeal of such empirical methods within Cognitive Linguistics: The theoretical background of this development is provided by the growing tendency of Cognitive Linguistics to stress its essential nature as a usage-based linguistics—a form of linguistic analysis, that is, that takes into account not just grammatical structure, but that sees this structure as arising from and interacting with actual language use.

The central notions of usage-based linguistics have been programmatically outlined in different publications Langacker ; Kemmer and Barlow ; Tomasello , ; Bybee and Hopper b ; Croft and Cruse , and a number of recent volumes show how the program can be put into practice Barlow and Kemmer ; Bybee and Hopper a ; Verhagen and van de Weijer The link between the self-awareness of Cognitive Linguistics as a usage-based form of linguistic investigation and the deployment of empirical methods is straightforward: Also, if Cognitive Linguistics belongs to cognitive science, it would be natural to expect the use of techniques that have proved their value in the cognitive sciences at large.

Experimental psychology, for instance, has a long tradition of empirical studies of cognition. So, one might count on the use of the same methods in Cognitive Linguistics. And obviously, the growing interest in the link between Cognitive Linguistics and neuroscience headed by the Neural Theory of Language Group of George Lakoff and Jerome Feldman goes in the same direction. The recent rise of interest in empirical methods does not imply, to be sure, that empirical approaches were absent in the earlier stages of Cognitive Linguistics.

The methodology of European studies in Cognitive Linguistics in particular has tended to be more corpus-based than the early American studies, which were predominantly introspective. The use of corpus materials which seems to have come to the attention of the broader community of Cognitive Linguistics only since Kemmer and Barlow was already part of early European studies like Dirven and Taylor , Rudzka-Ostyn , Schulze , Goossens , and Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema Early experimental studies, on the other hand, are represented by the work of Gibbs , and many more and Sandra and Rice In this respect, what is changing is not so much the presence of empirical research as such, but rather the extent to which the belief in such a methodology is shared by cognitive linguists at large.

However, the empirical aspects of usage-based linguistics still often remain programmatic: In the realm of corpus research, for instance, the type of quantitatively well-founded investigations that may be found in the work of Gries , Stefanowitsch , Gries and Stefanowitsch , and Stefanowitsch and Gries and in that of Grondelaers, Speelman, and Geeraerts , and Speelman, Grondelaers, and Geeraerts is still rather exceptional. For an overview of the methodological state of affairs in usage-based linguistics, see Tummers, Heylen, and Geeraerts While the reasons for this relative lack of enthusiasm may to some extent be practical training in experimental techniques or corpus research is not a standard part of curricula in linguistics , one cannot exclude the possibility of a more principled rejection.

Cognitive Linguistics considers itself to be a nonobjectivist theory of language, whereas the use of corpus materials involves an attempt to maximalize the objective basis of linguistic descriptions. Is an objectivist methodology compatible with a nonobjectivist theory? Isn't any attempt to reduce the role of introspection and intuition in linguistic research contrary to the spirit of Cognitive Linguistics, which stresses the semantic aspects of the language—and the meaning of linguistic expressions is the least tangible of linguistic phenomena.

Because meanings do not present themselves directly in the corpus data, will introspection not always be used in any cognitive analysis of language? There seems to exist a tension, in other words, between a broad methodological tendency in Cognitive Linguistics that considers introspection the most or perhaps the only appropriate method for studying meaning and a marginal but increasing tendency to apply empirical methods that are customary in the other cognitive sciences.

Resolving that tension is likely to be on the agenda of Cognitive Linguistics in the near future. As we mentioned and illustrated several times in the course of this introductory chapter, Cognitive Linguistics is far from being a unified and stabilized body of knowledge. We have tried, in the course of compiling and editing this Handbook , not to make the enterprise of Cognitive Linguistics look more unified than it actually is. Nevertheless, theoretical unification may be expected high on the future research agenda of Cognitive Linguistics.

In this respect, we hope that the survey of Cognitive Linguistics that is offered in the present volume will not only introduce novices to the full richness and dynamism of research in Cognitive Linguistics, but that it may also help the cognitive linguistic community at large to define the directions for the future more clearly. Barlow, Michael, and Suzanne Kemmer, eds.

Usage-based models of language. A tool, a bond or a territory: Language ideologies in the US and in Switzerland. The typology of motion and posture verbs: In Bernd Kortmann, ed.

1. Uncle Sam Cant Count: A History of Failed Government Investments, from Beaver Pelts to Green Energy.
2. Cognitive linguistics?
3. Mixed Messages.
4. Forgot Password?.

Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective 93— Phonology and language use. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Bybee and Paul Hopper, eds. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Croft, William, and D. An integrated understanding of scientific development. It was founded by George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker. Lakoff coined the term "cognitive linguistics" in in his book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" , one of his most famous writings.

Lakoff had already previously written many publications discussing the role of various cognitive processes involved in the use of language. In , he published the paper "Cognitive Grammar: Some Preliminary Speculations" , in which he also coined the term " cognitive grammar ". However, by the end of the s, the field had attracted the attention of many people and started to grow.

The journal Cognitive Linguistics was established in as the first journal specialized in research in that field. Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the stance adopted by Noam Chomsky and others in the field of generative grammar. Although cognitive linguists do not necessarily deny that part of the human linguistic ability is innate, they deny that it is separate from the rest of cognition.

They thus reject a body of opinion in cognitive science suggesting that there is evidence for the modularity of language. Departing from the tradition of truth-conditional semantics , cognitive linguists view meaning in terms of conceptualization. Instead of viewing meaning in terms of models of the world, they view it in terms of mental spaces. They argue that knowledge of linguistic phenomena — i. However, they assert that the storage and retrieval of linguistic data is not significantly different from the storage and retrieval of other knowledge, and that use of language in understanding employs similar cognitive abilities to those used in other non-linguistic tasks.

Cognitive linguistics suffers from three defective dogmas, which are the scope of much of the criticism CL receives. These three dogmas are from the hypotheses of embodiment engendered by CL. Two basic commitments were described by George Lakoff in These two commitments are the basis of orientation and approach followed by cognitive linguists:.

Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to mesh together these findings into a coherent whole. A further complication arises because the terminology of cognitive linguistics is not entirely stable, both because it is a relatively new field and because it interfaces with a number of other disciplines.

Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming accepted ways of analysing literary texts, too. Thus the geometrical intuition of Aristotle's notion can be dynamically formulated in the framework of catastrophe theory which inherits basic insights of Plato's mathematics.

Slogans like argument is war or love is a journey introduced by Lakoff and Johnson may control the mapping of a whole encyclopedia related to war or to journey , or to another encyclopedia of notions referring to argumentation and love affairs. The basic features in these cases are selection i. Thus, if love is considered as a journey , it would be rather pleasant, short and easy going.

In the case of love is craziness or love is war very different aspects of love experience are foregrounded. It is most likely that there is an infinite number of perspectives that are possible some are more frequent than others, and they depend on cultural traditions. The question beyond the illustrative treatment by Lakoff is the following: Are such seemingly arbitrary selections and perspectives stable, repetitive and, therefore, transmittable between subjects or even cultures? If yes, how is this achieved? The phenomenological position chosen by Johnson ; in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty is called embodiment.

Introducing Cognitive Linguistics - Oxford Handbooks

It "postulates that there exists a certain isomorphism between the mental mechanisms which ensure the stability of a concept Q, and the physical and material mechanisms which ensure the stability of the actual object K represented by Q. It follows that the more 'complex' a concept is, the more its stability needs regulator mechanisms, the greater is its 'semantic density'" Thom Early experienced body related phenomena are semantically more dense than later experiences which cover a larger area of human ecology and are more numerous.

The metaphorical process is the unfolding of primary pregnancies meanings into a rich encyclopedia of human knowledge which is linguistically mediated. Lakoff's metaphor hypothesis is just the peak of this iceberg. The fundamental cognitive problem of a semantics of embodiment concerns the nature of the mapping from non-linguistic embodied concepts to simple linguistic terms body-near , and from there to more abstract levels social experience, intellectual activity.

The questions, which must be asked, are:. Maps are interesting, if they select characteristic features and forget other ones. They should also preserve a basic structure the "kernel" of the mapping. In most interesting cases, they also reduce the dimension of the object mapped.

1. Psycholinguistics/Theories and Models of Language Acquisition.
2. Introducing Cognitive Linguistics;
3. Building Brains: 600 Activity Ideas for Young Children (NONE).
4. Article Contents.
5. Shodan: A Step by Step Learning Guide?
6. Transforming learning and development.

A schematic road map may even be one-dimensional and preserve just the distances on a path. In the case of embodiment, our bodily self-perception is basically three-dimensional, and it may be mapped on a set of one-dimensional scales in language, like: If several senses are implied, like vision of parts of our body , hearing, smell, etc.

Under these conditions a mapping to some mental representation memory and to language should normally be unstable. If the mapping is iterated, e. At all levels very specific controls must exist in order to guarantee stability and prevent chaotic or input-neutral results. When there is a high level of stability of the primary mappings, a body-mind-language must be presupposed if metonymic and metaphorical mappings should preserve stability although they increase vagueness and ambiguity.

For metonymy a stable segmentation of wholes into parts must be presupposed, and for metaphor the existence of a similarity- or nearness- measure which may control transitions like love IS a journey , love IS fire , and argument IS war must be assumed. Lakoff and Johnson ignore the question of segmentation in a continuum and assume that a segmented universe of semantic entities already exists. Langacker has discussed the issue of continuum versus discreteness. Nevertheless, all current cognitive models in this tradition stick to the classical structuralist ontology of a world and a language consisting already of properly segmented entities.

The proper aim of linguistics is therefore to classify these entities and describe the combinatorial restrictions on a free algebra defined on discrete and finite sets of phonemes, morphemes, words, or basic clause types. It is known from chaos theory cf. Peitgen et alii The input information is lost and the iterative process is "frozen" into a standard pattern.

A classical example of such a frozen result of self mapping under deformation is shown in Figure 8 and is called the Sierpinski triangle. Two consequences may be drawn:. These are the most plausible assumptions underlying any semantics of embodiment. Where does meaning come from? I will just comment on two simple examples of Langacker's procedures:. The "dynamics" consist just in an aggregation of three set-theoretical situations, which are rendered by quasi-topological Venn-diagrams:.

Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens

This representation contains neither an intrinsic time-scale and motion on this scale; i. Thus it is even more static than Talmy's models that introduced a kind of folk-dynamics, which could be further specified in dynamic terms. Even at this low level of modelling, it remains totally obscure where the difference between ENTER and FIND lies semantically, let alone to ask for the difference between find , catch , eat and other bivalent asymmetric verbs.

Contrary to Langacker's model cf. Nevertheless, it is still dynamically very poor. Thus it is obvious that the 16 archetypes enumerated by Thom can not differentiate the set of basic verbs that were examined in Ballmer and Brennenstuhl It uses results from the psychological study of motion programs and motion perception cf.

Edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens

If we consider simple movements with one or two limbs and look for analogies in physical mechanics, we will find the elastic pendulum and the double pendulum. Figure 11 shows the analogy between a double pendulum and the movement of a human leg. The right-hand side of Figure 11 shows phases in the movement of the human leg while the person is walking experimental results of Johansson The dynamical system of the human leg is comparable to a double pendulum it is strongly damped and has restricted domains of freedom.

The motion of a double pendulum and of a human leg. The steady motion in phase B is the basic schema, which underlies the semantics of simple verbs of locomotion like go , run , or drive. These have been traditionally characterized as durative. Instabilities of a simple type can be added to the basic schema using different types of information:. The process of locomotion of a body is either continuous durative or it involves an implicit or explicit boundary and an orientation of the process relative to this boundary.

The introduction of an orientation defines a goal and introduces a kind of intentionality. The path from the source to the goal can be complicated by the introduction of intermediate forces. We find two fundamental types of intermediate forces in linguistic scenarios. The cognitive schemata that have been classified here are not only relevant for the lexicon of the verb; they also form the cognitive basis for causative constructions see Talmy The application to linguistics and other human sciences had first followed the standards of applied mathematics, and in my work I tried to stick to these standards as far as linguistic methodology allowed it.

It became clear that the lack of quantitative and statistical methodology in semantics restricts such a program. The topological nature of elementary catastrophe theory asks for a "rough" modelling by which only general features of the field in question can be captured. In the beginning, the "dynamics of language" must mainly consider critical transitions, bimodal, and trimodal oppositions, etc.

Specific predictions or an exact reproduction of descriptive details cannot be the goal of these models because it is by definition a topological and not a geometrical model, and all descriptions have to be interpreted as modulo smooth deformations diffeomorphisms ; i. This means that only very general questions may be assessed with the help of qualitative dynamics. In the period after I developed proposals for different linguistic subfields, such as word semantics, verbal semantics, vagueness and ambiguity, nominal composition, dialogue and narrative, phonology, predication and the semantics of time cf.

Wildgen for a summary. In all cases, specific phenomena that imply structural transitions, the creation destruction of category boundaries, and the multistability of lexical and syntactic forms are selected and treated with the help of dynamic systems theory. In the following I will consider current models of neurosemantics in order to check if they rather ask for a style of cognitive semantics as proposed by Lakoff, Langacker and Talmy or take a path which is akin to that of dynamic semantics.

The field of neurosemantics is exclusively based on experimental results obtained in the analysis of neural dynamics measured in the brain of animals, when they assess meaning in their environment perception, attention, memory , and on neural waves measured in humans during the processing of linguistic tasks. The proposed cognitive mechanisms are neither inferred from high level linguistic performances and the intuitions speakers share about them , as in cognitive semantics, nor from very general features of dynamic systems, as in dynamic semantics.

In this respect neurosemantic proposals are independent from both traditions, and they allow us to judge the cognitive plausibility of both paradigms. The simplest case of semantic composition can be studied in nominal syntax. Consider a noun; e. How does the brain compose a head-noun referring to form with two satellites referring to colour and motion? Andreas Engel distinguishes three major areas for sense related information: V 5 , the occipital areas and the parietal ones.

The major binding process is one of temporal synchronization of assemblies, which form wholes gestalts from parts, and desynchronization, which distinguishes figure and ground. The fronto-parietal centres select features that are then passed on to working memory and planning. Parts or features of a visual whole are linked by the synchronic firing of a set of neurons an assembly during a short time interval.

In the example, neural assemblies hundreds or thousand of neurons and their firing rhythms linked to square , to red , and to move are bound together by the internal synchrony of the assemblies. This type of analysis concerns only the composition in perception, attentiveness and memory, but one may conjecture a parallel process for words and their composition in syntactic constructions involving nouns and adjectives. In experiments with human subjects solving linguistic tasks, characteristic brain-waves in the gamma-spectrum, i.

They are the correlate of synchronization between assemblies in the brain. Semantic separation distinction leads to asynchronies which can also be measured in human brains. Composition is therefore in principle characterized by the dynamic behaviour of cell assemblies in different parts of the brain, and the relevant brain-features are the synchrony and asynchrony of firing in these assemblies. Further research has shown that memory and top-down processes in recognition and processing show similar mechanisms. The coding of compositional effects is, therefore, rather dynamic and temporal than static and spatial.

This contradicts with a large number of pictures used in cognitive grammar; e. However, it shows at the same time that the very basic dynamic schemata of catastrophe theoretic semantics have to be elaborated in order to fit the more specific dynamics observed in brain activity. As a first consequence one can formulate a desideratum of cognitive linguistics. The basic types of composition of parts constituents to produce wholes gestalts must be cognitively explained in the case of:. If these basic mechanisms have been further elucidated, we can then begin to build a cognitive grammar which is scientifically founded.

Langacker's proposals may be valuable as intuitive hypotheses, which must be specified and critically evaluated in terms of neurological processing. As a further result one can formulate some restrictions on compositionality due to temporal binding. The different firing rates that can be easily discriminated on a background of inherent noise and accidental synchronies may set a low limit to the number of objects that can be simultaneously bound.

The restrictions of valence patterns and of embeddings recursive operations have been discredited by Chomsky as performance effects. To the contrary, they are hints to the nature of the compositional process in language and thus more interesting than the algebraic notion of recursive operations.

Here the application of catastrophe theory to semantics cf. Because the complex but structurally stable valence patterns lie beyond the current experimental reach of neurological experiments, the plausibility of dynamic semantics must still rely on a rough isomorphism between patterns in the real world physical process patterns and linguistic forms sentences in different languages.

We presume that the brain as the mediating apparatus has the means to map the ecologically relevant aspects of physical processes into stable linguistic patterns. The measurements of ERP and fMRI in experiments involving natural language cannot simply elaborate given linguistic models as those put forward by Talmy, Lakoff and Langacker. One needs an intermediate level that generalizes the specific findings and constitutes a neurodynamic model of semantic processing.

Such a model will build on the topology of the brain, synchronization and desynchronization, coupling of subnetworks with self-organization filtering, choice of dominant modes , self-reference and monitoring in consciousness, etc. The class of models emerging in this field will certainly belong to dynamic systems theory, although such qualitative and simple models as catastrophe theory will be insufficient, insofar as chaos-attractors, transitions between order and chaos, and stochastic models with diffusion equations will be needed. In order to use this type of modelling for linguistic concerns, theoretical linguistics must be opened for dynamic models, which are more compatible with the future format of a neurolinguistically-founded semantics and are able to catch the intuitive notions of motion and force in natural language expressions.

Many of them led to changes in the current version. The Life and Growth of Language Petitot does not just reduce objectivity to forms of lived experience, but assumes with Kant that there are schematisms and apriori forms underlying such experiences. Contrary to Kant, he assumes that such aprioris are neither formal nor material; they are rather historically constituted and non-absolute; the categories are rather regional and not universal cf.

In the English version of the conclusions Petitot Thus the cuspoids, which form an infinite series, correspond to regular polygons in geometry. The umbilics unfoldings with two parameters correspond to Klein's two-sided surfaces and the so-called Exceptionals E6, E7, E8 to the Platonic solids three basic types and their duals. Applications of catastrophe theory to nature and man are therefore a generalization of Plato's cosmology and psychology in his Timaeus for the relation between psychologically motivated prototypes and mathematical schematisms; cf.

In current cognitive linguistics cf. Such a position ignores the social character of most prototypes and their relevance for mathematics and natural sciences, i. Embodiment is only an aspect of natural phenomenology highlighted by Merleau-Ponty in his elaboration and critique of Husserl.