Methodology in Cognitive Linguistics
What Cognitive Linguistics actually does
Long-standing presence of an empirical methodology
To begin with, we may indeed notice that the empirical methods mentioned above are to a greater or smaller extent present in the field of Cognitive Linguistics, and have been so for quite a while. The following observations are not meant as a systematic overview, but merely as a set of examples establishing the long-standing presence of the various approaches in Cognitive Linguistics. To keep matters simple, let us distinguish between two groups: elicitation and experimentation on the one hand, corpus-based observation on the other.
With regard to the use of elicitation and experimentation, psycholinguistic work has since long been part of Cognitive Linguistics in the work of Gibbs (1994 and many more). Another influential early example is Sandra and Rice (1995). The related use of neurolinguistic evidence, which is now most conspicuously associated with George Lakoff’s Neural Theory of Language group, may be noted as early as Deane (1992). Elicitation techniques have also been used in anthropological and comparative research. For instance, to get an independent assessment of the relation between language and cognition, non-linguistic tests are used, such as problem-solving tasks (Pederson 1995). Production tasks are also used in language acquisition research: Berman and Slobin (1994) use pictures to elicit stories from children.
Corpus data too were used early on in the history of Cognitive Linguistics. The methodology of European studies in Cognitive Linguistics in particular has tended to be more corpus-based than the early American studies, which were predominantly introspective. The use of corpus materials (which seems to have come to the attention of the broader community of Cognitive Linguistics only since Barlow and Kemmer 2000) was already part of early European studies like Dirven, Goossens, Putseys and Vorlat (1982), Dirven and Taylor (1988), Rudzka-Ostyn (1988), Schulze (1988), Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema (1994).
