| Lemma | language |
|---|---|
| Categoria grammaticale | N |
| Lingua | inglese |
| Sigla | Lakoff (1987) |
| Titolo | Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things |
| Sinonimi | |
| Rinvii | |
| Traduzioni | |
| Citazioni | Language is among the most characteristic of human cognitive activities. To understand how human beings categorize in general, we must at least understand human categorization in the special case of human language. Human language provides an immensely rich source of examples of categorization that is not only abstract, but also automatic and almost entirely unconscious.
Each human language is structured in terms of an enormously complex system of categories of various kinds: phonetic, phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. Linguistic categories are among the kinds of abstract categories that any adequate theory of the human conceptual system must be able to account for. Human language is therefore an important source of evidence for the nature of cognitive categories. Conversely, general results concerning the nature of cognitive categorization should affect the theory of categorization used in theorizing about language. If languages make use of the kind of categories used by the mind in general, then the theory of language is very much bound up with general issues in cognition. Language is [...] based on cognition. The structure of language uses the same devices used to structure cognitive models-image schemas, which are understood in terms of bodily functioning. Language is made meaningful because it is directly tied to meaningful thought and depends upon the nature of thought. Thought is made meaningful via two direct connections to preconceptual bodily functioning, which is in turn highly constrained, but by no means totally constrained, by the nature of the world that we function within.
In experiential realism, there is no unbridgeable gulf between language and thought on one hand and the world on the other. Language and thought are meaningful because they are motivated by our functioning as part of reality. Even at the level of the individual word, language is an inseparable part of general cognition. Psychologists are no more justified in ignoring language as mere labeling than linguists are in ignoring general principles of cognition, such as principles of categorization. Human language is based on human concepts, which are in turn motivated by human experience. |