1.3 Cognitive linguistics and metaphor, symbol and allegory

Cognitive Linguistics is a modern school of linguistic thought and practice that attempts to investigate the relationship between human language, mind and experience (Evans 2007: 2). It is rooted in in the emergence of modern cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s, as the result of discontent with formal approaches to language. By the early 1990s, cognitive linguistics has grown into “a broadly grounded, self-conscious intellectual movement” (Langacker 1991: xv).

Cognitive linguists attempt to describe and account for the systematicity, the structure, the functions of language and more importantly, how these functions are realized by the language system. They assume that language reflects patterns of thought and the study of language is to study patterns of conceptualization. Language study provides insights into the nature, structure and organization of thoughts and ideas.

Cognitive linguistics with its new progress sheds more light on the mapping processing of metaphor, symbol and allegory. In the due course, different approaches of literary criticism are integrated to give a fuller account of that process. This comprehensive model may well account for how literary texts like Moby-Dick produce so many controversial interpretations and to what extent they are acceptable.