Cognitive direction in modern language science

Abstract

At the present stage of development cognitive linguistics is a branch of a new scientific paradigm, which has been called functional-active linguistics. The main thesis of linguistic functionalism is the statement about the derivation of language form from the functions of language. The cognitive direction of functionalism especially highlights the role of cognitive functions and assumes that other functions are derived from them or reduced to them.The main principle of cognitive linguistics is the idea that the content of human consciousness can be studied through the learning of language. The cognitive approach to language analysis consists in identifying and explaining the processes of categorization and conceptualization, which, being reflected in language, are reconstructed in the form of a conceptual system. In this investigation, we proceed from the requirements of the semantic-cognitive approach, aimed at studying the relationship between the semantics of language and the conceptosphere of the people, the connection of semantic processes with cognitive ones. The establishment of the notion “concept” in linguistics marked a new stage in understanding the methods, patterns and features of the interaction of language and consciousness, expanded the framework of the substantive analysis of linguistic phenomena and provided much greater depth and effectiveness of semantic research. The cognitive approach allows revealing and tracing the mechanism of reflection and distribution in the semantic structure of language knowledge about the world and about the language itself. The subject of research of cognitive linguistics is the meaning of language units of different language levels that objectify one or another concept, and the ultimate goal is the reconstruction (modelling) of the concept as a mental unit based on language data. At the present stage, cognitive linguistics investigates the problems of representing mental mechanisms of language acquisition and the principles of their structuring; differentiation of cognitive, linguistic, communicative and other types of consciousness; identification of the form of dependence of national thinking on national culture and mentality. At the moment, one can talk about the following directions in cognitive linguistics: culturological – the study of concepts as elements of culture based on data from various sciences; linguocultural – the study of concepts which are named by linguistic units as elements of national linguistic culture in connection with national values and national features of this culture: the direction from language to culture; logical – the analysis of concepts by logical methods outside of direct dependence on their linguistic form; philosophical-semiotic – the cognitive principles of signification are studied; semantic-cognitive – the study of the lexical and grammatical semantics of language as a means of accessing the content of concepts, as a means of modelling them from the semantics of language to the concept sphere.