| Author(s) | Latifa Alnajjar |
| Affiliation | Dept. of Arabic Language, U.A.E University- Alain |
| Title | Mechanism of Linguistic Categorization between Cognitive Linguistics and Arabic Grammar |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Arts. Volume 17, No 1. (2005/1425) |
| Abstract | Categorization can be considered a basic procedure for every branch of knowledge, particularly in linguistics. It is the most important systematic device used by researchers in language description at different levels. Categorization is considered, at the same time, a fundamental component of the human thinking, it plays a major role in the process of reasoning and in understanding the meaning of things and words as well. Scholars, and to begin with the Greek philosophers, began to initiate rules to canonize the mechanism of categorization that insure the validity and required results. These standards remained axioms whose validity and applicability ware never questioned. However, linguistics, through researches and field studies which study mechanism of human reasoning, offered very strong evidence that the standards adopted by scholars to control the process of categorization has no relation to what occurs in the human mind while it starts to categorize things. On the contrary, the process of categorization in the human mind is subject to norms, which completely differ from what Aristotelian school followers’ adapt. The standards of cognitive linguistics categorization in human mind are very similar to what Arab grammarians have adopted in description and canonizing the linguistic phenomenon. This research does not claim that the Arab grammarians were the first to establish such norms, rather it discusses the findings of the researchers in this field and compares them to statements made by Arab grammarians on the topic. |
