The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 66. 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. | 620 GEOFF NATHAN these children to have simply stored the surface form they heard around them since these forms are obviously constructed on the basis of a previously stored relatively correct version of the If the children constructed these varying pronunciations as attempts at the same target we can only understand what is happening if we assume that the children have stored something close to the adult phonemic pronunciation as some kind of privileged representation which they aim at each time they speak and as the ideal form the prototype that they perceive when others speak. In this respect Cognitive Phonology is quite different from standard phonological theory. Cognitive Phonology argues that phonemes are sounds that is not underspecified lists of features but rather real fully specified prototypical We know what a t-sound sounds like and we can hear it in both two thu and in mitten mi ir even though the prototype occurs in neither. But representations are mental images of actual words spelled with actual sounds. What Cognitive Phonology accepts from traditional process-oriented phonology is that the actual production normally does not match the mental image because phonemes are implemented in contexts and adjusted in real time to fit those contexts. Here is another significant difference from the traditional structuralist view complementary distribution and phonetic similarity are not definitions of the phoneme although they may be useful tools for the linguist attempting to understand the behavior of a language he or she does not speak . As Stampe pointed out in his first works 1968 1969 complementary distribution is a consequence of the fact that context-sensitive processes apply to underlying forms. Phonetic similarity is a direct result of the fact that processes only minimally change target sounds although chains of processes like chains of metaphorical extensions in semantics may lead to very disparate instantiations of a single .
