Language and cognition
Linguistics as a cognitive enterprise
As a generativist, I am interested in what we know when we know a language, which is of course a cognitive question. The Chomskyan revolution has thus made the study of language a cognitive enterprise.
It is thus perhaps surprising that generativists found themselves at (linguistic) wars with linguists that are sometimes referred to as cognitive linguists. While both groups are ultimately interested in how language is embedded into our cognition, their answers differ (hence the wars).
Generativists have long held the belief that language is special, autonomous, only interfacing with (but not directly influenced by other) aspects of cognition. In contrast, cognitive linguists have it that language is shaped by general cognition.
With the advent of minimalism (and talk about third factors), things have changed a bit and the difference between the two approaches is diminishing, perhaps.
Questions I explore
How do children acquire language?
What does the linguistic profile of neuro-diverse populations tell us?
My interests
Up until the publication of my monograph on interactional language, I was mostly interested in the linguistic reality of the generalizations I explored and of the analyses I developed.
Though, the universal spine hypothesis and the interactional spine hypothesis have some semblance to generative semantics approaches which is at the root of some cognitive approaches to linguistics.
I was led to think that syntactic structure is not just structure, it is structure with some content (the spine). And the content I proposed is part of it lends itself to exploring its relation to general cognition.
And that's what I am interested now. The cognitive significance of the generalizations and analyses I have explored thus far.
There are various empirical domains that I explore, which are ultimately questions about the relation between language and cognition.
What does grammar tell us about the nature of knowledge?
What is the relation between language and emotion?