The Methodology of Cognitive Linguistics

The present article summarizes the research methods in cognitive linguistics. It is pointed out that cognitive linguistics is the interdisciplinary study on cognition and language which has the attributes of both natural science and social sciences. The research methods in cognitive linguistics are from many other fields of science, which can be categorized into qualitative research and quantitative research. Generally, cognitive linguistics adopts the research methods from an eclecticism perspective. Except using the introspection and individual intuition, cognitive linguists usc the research findings ill xperimental psychology and the data ill language acquisition studies, and, the language contrast and comparison based on the methodology of historical linguistics are also utilized by the scholars in cognitive linguistics; methods m dialect research and corpus linguistics are of reat helps in revealing the cognitive operations in language.