The purpose of this Master’s/PhD course is to acquaint you with the major ideas in Cognitive Linguistics. The course provides a focused and comprehensive postgraduate-level introduction to the framework and gives you the tools to carry out original research on an aspect of linguistics that interests you. Cognitive Linguistics is an innovative framework that has dominated functional linguistic theorising since the end of the last century. Central to the approach is the meaningful functioning of language in all its guises and all its uses in text and discourse.

Different empirical methods – corpus techniques as well as experiments – are used in order to arrive at a better understanding of what linguistic expression reveals about human cognition and how cognitive abilities give rise to patterns and structures in natural language usage. Language is seen as a highly dynamic entity for which no absolute boundaries between the traditional areas of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics are assumed. The study of language becomes an exciting and challenging part of the study of human perception, cognition and interaction. In this course, you undertake a project on the language and phenomena of your own choice and carry out a minor empirical study under the guidance of experts in the field