Article

Name: Continuous Reframing: G. Lakoff, Cognitive Linguistics, and ‘Language Poetry’

Authors: Vladimir V. Feshchenko

Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract: The article is devoted to a little-known episode of direct contacts between modern linguistics and experimental poetry. In the 1980s, the era of the so-called “linguistics wars” in the USA, that took place between representatives of generative grammar and cognitive semantics, “poetic wars” unfolded, one of the sides of which were the poets of the “language school”. G. Lakoff published a number of polemical articles in which he discusses the value of the “language movement” in poetry and its prox-imity to the strategies of cognitive linguistics. In particular, the focus is on the issue of “framing” knowledge in language. “Language poets” and cognitive linguists have in common not only their attention to metaphor as an operator of thinking, but also to language as a mediator between cognition and aesthesis, between experience and consciousness, between the poetic and metalinguistic functions of language.

Keywords: “language poetry”, cognitive linguistics, frames, language experiment

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