“A human face” of cognitive linguistics

Abstract

In this article, I want to put forward the following argument: Cognitive Linguistics – after a long hegemony of Chomskyan formalist linguistics – has offered models of language as “motivated” by general and prior cognitive abilities; as such it has been able to provide representations of a much wider range of linguistic phenomena (both grammatical and lexical); however, the “human face” of Cognitive Linguistics is that of a generic human being rather than that of actual people: members of particular social communities in which languages develop through “figuration” and “articulation”.