COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS: THE RELATION BETWEEN HUMAN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE IN THE LIGHT OF METAPHOR AND SEMANTICS

Abstract

The article examines the relation between language and thought as it is conceived within cognitive linguistics, with particular attention to conceptual metaphor and to the model of meaning that follows from it. The author sets out the theoretical commitments that distinguish the cognitive approach from formal semantics — the treatment of language as continuous with general cognition, the encyclopaedic conception of meaning, and the rejection of a sharp division between semantics and pragmatics — and shows how these commitments transform the analysis of figurative language. Conceptual metaphor theory is presented not as a claim about ornamental speech but as a claim about the structure of abstract concepts, and the empirical evidence for it from psycholinguistic experiments, gesture research and corpus analysis is reviewed alongside the principal objections raised against it. The article further considers cross-linguistic and cultural variation in metaphorical mapping, illustrating the argument with Uzbek material, and discusses the methodological problem of identifying metaphor in discourse. It concludes that the cognitive approach yields a testable programme rather than a settled doctrine, and that its further development depends on typologically diverse data.