Additional lecture: Cognitive linguistics

Winter term 2021/2022
Tuesday, 11:30-13:00
Room 601 in Collegium Novum, Building A
30 contact hours (1 class a week)
ECTS credits: 3
Lecturers: Piotr Wyroślak

Course description

Cognitive Linguistics is a family of theories which demonstrate how our everyday human experience manifests itself in language – and how studying language can help us to know more about how our minds work. Throughout this course you will get a general understanding of what Cognitive Linguistics is about – as well as the most powerful ideas it has offered to linguistics. In class, we will try to critically examine them – and check against real-life data. Some of the questions we will attempt to tackle include:

  • What is Cognitive Linguistics? How it came to be? How does it relate to various fields of linguistics?
  • What assumptions do Cognitive linguists make? What consequences do they have for the way we do linguistic research?
  • What are metaphor and metonymy? What can language tell us about the way we make sense of our experience of time, feelings and social life?
  • How do we divide world into meaningful categories? What can we learn about it by studying languages of the world?
  • What is usage-based approach in linguistics? How does usage shape the language? What does it mean for the way we study languages?
  • How to build grammars in away that takes into account what we know about cognition?