[4] Chomsky considered linguistics as a subfield of cognitive science in the 1970s but called his model transformational or generative grammar.
They argue that cognitive linguistics should not be taken as the name of a specific selective framework, but as a whole field of scientific research that is assessed by its evidential rather than theoretical value.
[7] Generative grammar studies behavioural instincts and the biological nature of cognitive-linguistic algorithms, providing a computational–representational theory of mind.
[9][10] For a famous example, it was argued by linguist Noam Chomsky that sentences of the type "Is the man who is hungry ordering dinner" are so rare that it is unlikely that children will have heard them.
Generative grammarians then took as their task to find out all about innate structures through introspection in order to form a picture of the hypothesised language faculty.
Lakoff hypothesises that principles of abstract reasoning may have evolved from visual thinking and mechanisms for representing spatial relations that are present in lower animals.
[28] For example, in the expression "It is quarter to eleven", the preposition to represents a modal schema which is manifested in language as a visual or sensorimotoric 'metaphor'.
Language is thought of as one of the human cognitive abilities, along with perception, attention, memory, motor skills, and visual and spatial processing, rather than being subordinate to them.
[36] Cognitive linguistics offers a scientific first principle direction for quantifying states-of-mind through natural language processing.
Traditionally grammar has been defined as a set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases and words in a natural language.
[16] Such rules are derived from observing the conventionalized pairings of meaning to understand sub-context in the evolution of language patterns.
[29] The cognitive approach to identifying sub-context by observing what comes before and after each linguistic construct provides a grounding of meaning in terms of sensorimotoric embodied experience.
These cognitive NLP methods enable software to analyze sub-context in terms of internal embodied experience.
[39][40] All three methods are used to power NLP techniques like stemming and lemmatisation in order to obtain statistically relevant listing of the who, what, where & when in text through named-entity recognition and Topic model programs.
The same methods have been applied with NLP techniques like a bag-of-words model to obtain statistical measures of emotional context through sentiment analysis programs.
The specific meaning of cognitive linguistics, the proper address of the name, and the scientific status of the enterprise have been called into question.
Criticism includes an overreliance on introspective data, a lack of experimental testing of hypotheses and little integration of findings from other fields of cognitive science.