Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (1st Edition)

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics is a branch of linguistics. Based on the theory of the second generation of cognitive science and experiential philosophy, it was born on the basis of opposing the transformational generative grammar of mainstream linguistics and began to take shape from the late 1980s to the 1990s. Cognitive linguistics involves artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology, systems theory, and other disciplines. Aiming at the innate view held by generative linguistics, it proposes that the creation, learning and application of language must be explained through human cognition, because cognitive ability is the foundation of human knowledge. As a relatively new research paradigm in linguistic studies, Cognitive Linguistics has made a lot of remarkable achievements both in theory and in practice in the past 40 years. It has been widely used and become a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary school of linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics is closely related to psycholinguistics and systemic functional linguistics. It is based on cognitive science, and the research of cognitive linguistics is to use cognitive psychology and linguistic theory to study the relationship between representation, concept, and language structure. Psycholinguistics is based on psychology, it involves language memory, phonological perception, language learning, and so on. Compared with Systemic Functional Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics focuses more on the internal factors of the speaker, that is, the psychological mechanism and the generation and exchange of meaning in the cognitive process. Systemic Functional Linguistics focuses on the social communication of language, and studies language from the social function and use situation of language. The Routledge Handbook of cognitive linguistics gives a comprehensive introduction to cognitive linguistics. It covers the key areas of cognitive linguistics and contains a wide range of perspectives and methods in this area (Wen and Taylor, 2021). The book is worthy of serious study by cognitive linguistics learners with its cutting-edge views and reasonable suggestions.