Language and Space: The New Cognitive Revolution

This paper presents a short review of the cognitive movement in linguistics. The paper starts by discussing categorisation, which is one of the main research themes in cognitive linguistics. It first isolates some of the arguments that have led to a shift from the classical theory to a prototype account of categories, and then reviews the findings that have persuaded cognitive researchers that categorisation has an experiential basis and that spatial conceptualisations play an important role in language understanding. After this two areas in which the insights of cognitive linguistics have been applied, namely metaphor and the semantics of prepositions, are considered.