How universal mental operations that are not specific to language create highly diverse linguistic and cultural systems of communication

Abstract

The first rule of cognitive linguistics is to hunt for origins of linguistic powers in robust mental operations not specific to language. For millennia, language science has assumed that human beings possess mental operations for unifying, combining, and merging patterns to create expressions. In the reverse cognitive direction, human beings can analyze expressions produced by other human beings, to recognize patterns that were combined to produce those expressions. This article, in its third section, reviews some of the literature on this topic. Any such assumption about a linguistic power takes out a loan on theory that needs to be cashed out, if the theory is to be cognitive. To cash out such assumptions is to locate and model the non-language-specific cognitive operations that make the linguistic powers possible. This article proposes, in its first section, that the non-language-specific mental operation that accounts for these linguistic powers is blending, otherwise known as conceptual integration. In its second section, this article provides a topical review of blending in specific communicative form-meaning pairs and their combination. Blending is the foundation of creativity in communication, or more specifically, in the creation and combining of form-meaning pairs, often called “constructions.” Key words: construction grammar, cognitive linguistics, conceptual integration, blending.