The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 63. In the past decade, Cognitive Linguistics has developed into one of the most dynamic and attractive frameworks within theoretical and descriptive linguistics The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics is a major new reference that presents a comprehensive overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive/theoretical models of Cognitive Linguistics, and covers its various subfields, theoretical as well as applied. | 590 BRIGITTE NERLICH AND DAVID D. CLARKE of Cognitive Linguistics overlaps significantly with that of philosophy psychology and the cognitive sciences we will concentrate on the history of linguistics only with an occasional excursion to the history of philosophy. The chapters of this Handbook devoted to psychology cognitive science and philosophy include references to a number of forerunners in these fields see Harder chapter 48 and Sinha chapter 49. Section 2 of this chapter briefly describes the internal history of Cognitive Linguistics. The following sections discuss three topic areas of specific importance for Cognitive Linguistics polysemy metaphor and metonymy the embodiment of cognition and the Gestalt nature of linguistics. 2. The Short HistORY of Cognitive Linguistics Cognitive Linguistics emerged from its dissatisfaction with dominant orthodoxies in twentieth-century linguistics among them the structuralist formalist tradition in European semantics the generative formalist tradition that dominated research into syntax in North America and the formalist computational approach to semantics that prevailed in North America and Europe during the second half of the twentieth century. Natural allies of Cognitive Linguistics by contrast are functionalists and contextualists of all persuasions from the Prague school onward Functional Grammar Dik Systemic-Functional Grammar Halliday functional-typological theories of language Givon pragmatics ordinary language philosophy Grice Natural Morphology and Natural Phonology Stampe Dressler Donegan as well as the Columbia School of linguistics with William Diver as its head who himself followed in the footsteps of Andre Martinet . As Langacker 1998 1 wrote The movement called Cognitive Linguistics belongs to the functionalist tradition. This means that in contrast to formalist approaches language is no longer viewed as an autonomous system but rather as an integral facet of cognition not as a separate module or mental .
