6.3. Lexicology vs. Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Studies.

The subject matter of linguistics is language as a system. It aims at a detailed description of the structure of that system and how it functions. But methods employed in today’s linguistics alone cannot account for the complex processes that operate in human language. Linguistics as a science, therefore, looks to other fields of scientific inquiry to seek answers to questions traditional linguistics has not been able to give satisfactory answers to. Psycholinguistics is one such field. As a fusion of psychology and linguistics, it is the study of psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Psycholinguistics draws on a wide range of scientific fields to study how the brain processes language: neurobiology, information theory, linguistics and cognitive science. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, texts, etc. (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyholinguistics). As is obvious, it is a broad interdisciplinary field, determined by a very complex nature of language itself, which is a result of certain neurobiological processes, on the one hand, and sociocultural factors at work, on the other. The importance of psycholinguistics to lexicology consists in the fact that it seeks to find out how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears a word and sees it written or printed on a page. This branch of scientific inquiry also addresses questions related to how people – adults and infants – learn a language, both first and second. Accordingly, a great deal of research focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time.

What is particularly relevant for the study of words, however, is cognitive aspects of these studies, most notably issues addressed by cognitive linguistics, which interprets language in terms of concepts. It is directly relevant for the study of words, since research into the concept vs. word dichotomy goes back decades, if not centuries, and still has many questions unanswered. Cognitive scientists argue that knowledge of linguistic phenomena – i.e. phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and syntax – is essentially conceptual in nature. In fact, cognitive linguistics provides the most important interface between psychology/psycholinguistics and linguistics. It spans three key areas of study: cognitive semantics, cognitive approaches to grammar and cognitive phonology. All three are very closely associated with lexicology, but cognitive semantics especially has a direct bearing on it, since it deals primarily with lexical semantics. The latter, which examines the word’s meaning, is, as has been noted already, at the core of lexicological studies. Innovations brought to the study of word meaning by cognitive semantics include prototype theory, conceptual metaphors, and frame semantics. Judged by the sheer amount of research that has been carried out in the last decade, this is probably the most productive framework in present-day semantics [Geeraerts, 2010 : xiv]

Central to many cognitive studies is the notion of categorization. Categorization is viewed as the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. It implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorization]. Categorization received a major input with the pioneering research conducted by Eleanor Rosch, who claimed that some members of a category are necessarily more central than others. This claim, which implies a graded notion of categories, is commonly known as prototype theory and is a central idea in many models of cognitive science and cognitive semantics. According to this theory, we all have an image of a prototypical member in a category (when Ukrainians are asked to think of a bird, they are most likely to think of a sparrow (горобець) and less likely to think of a humming bird (колібрі), Shevchenko (Шевченко) will be the most ready example of a poet and a chair or a table will be the first (or nearly the first) choice of furniture). So each time we encounter a putative member of a category (bird, furniture etc.), we judge how much they resemble this prototype: the closer the resemblance, the more likely we are to assign them to the category in question, and therefore label them with a corresponding word [Hollmann, : 527]. Prototype-theoretical semantics has provided important points of departure for interpreting many notions in lexicology, e.g. semantic change, lexical fields, taxonomies, objective vs. socially-guided categorization of reality, conceptualization of reality etc.

Besides, taking their cue from ground-breaking research by M.Reddy, E.Rosch, G.Lakoff, M.Turner, M.Johnson and others [Reddy, Rosch, Lakoff], cognitive scientists have redefined metaphor by showing that generalizations governing poetic metaphorical expressions are not part of language but of thought and apply not only to literary, but ordinary, everyday language as well [Lakoff, 1992]. Within this theoretical framework, metaphor is understood as any mapping (Ukr. “проекція”) between normally separate conceptual domains (spheres). The purpose of this mapping is to structure an abstract and unfamiliar domain in terms of one that is less abstract and more familiar. What is revealing is that many of the most basic concepts in our conceptual system are also normally comprehended via metaphor – concepts like time, quantity, state, movement, change, action, etc. Let us consider, for example, how Lakoff interprets anger in terms of one of possible mappings, notably as ANGER IS FIRE⁵:

Those are inflammatory remarks. She was doing a slow burn. He was breathing fire. Your insincere apology just added fuel to the fire. Afer the argument, Dave was smoldering for days. That kindled my ire. Boy, am I burned up! He was consumed by his anger.

These metaphors highlight the cause of anger (kindle, inflame), the intensity and duration (slow burn, smoldering, burned up), the danger to others (breathing fire), and the damage to the angry person (consumed) [Lakoff, 1990 : 388]. The overlap between the effects of angry behavior and an angry person, on the one hand, and the characteristics and effects of fire provides a basis for these metaphors. Lakoff argues that a feeling (in our case, anger) has a rich conceptual structure and the nature of metaphors that represent emotions is closely linked to our bodily experiences. This basically means that there is an objective basis for conceptual metaphorical expressions and that they are, therefore, motivated. This, of course, goes against the grain of many traditional approaches to meaning and motivation behind meaning (in idioms, for example) and has necessitated a drastic overhaul of the question of motivation behind words’ and expressions’ meanings.

Research in cognitive linguistics has been brought to bear on many areas of lexicological analysis, most notably patterns governing polysemy, generalizations governing novel metaphorical language, processes of semantic change and metaphor and metonymy in general. All these patterns are ultimately crucial for word semantics.