Citation

Filipovič L. Lang. Linguist. Compass 2009; 3(1): 300-313.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Blackwell Publishing, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00115.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper discusses the ways in which Cognitive Linguistics informs Forensic Linguistics and Psycholinguistics and illustrates what potential future developments in these disciplines may be. The starting point is a typology of the world's languages, proposed by Len Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000) within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Talmy's typology is a classification of languages based on the lexical and syntactic means speakers use in order to map language-specific categories onto universal cognitive categories, such as motion events. Motion events were chosen because of their ubiquity in human experience. Two basic contrastive patterns in motion expressions have surfaced as a result: those where the Path of motion is typically expressed in a verb and those in which it is given out of the verb. All the world's languages can be divided into two major groups depending on which of the two patterns habitually prevails in use, and therefore could be termed ‘characteristic’ in a particular language. Spanish and English are the two languages in focus at present because they belong to two opposing types according to Talmy's typology. On this occasion the central aim is to illustrate the consequences of the relevant typological contrasts that bear relevance to forensic linguistic analysis of witness interviews and their translation as well as to provide a solid basis for a study of the interplay between language and cognition, especially in the psycholinguistic domains such as linguistic memory and language acquisition. By doing so, we will provide a comparative look across different disciplines and highlight the achievements of recent interdisciplinary research as well as current debates in a number of language-focused research areas.