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1CogniTextes is the on-line peer-reviewed journal of the Association Française de Linguistique Cognitive (AFLiCo). Its ambition is to provide a high quality forum of publication for cognitive linguistic research in France and abroad. By doing so, it is hoped that, on the one hand, linguists in France will become more familiar with Cognitive Linguistics, and that, on the other hand, the international cognitive community will become more familiar with cognitive linguistic research inspired by the French cognitive tradition.

2Internationally, “Cognitive Linguistics” is now generally used as an umbrella term for a number of related theories including Cognitive Grammar, (Radical) Construction Grammar, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory. All these approaches adopt a usage-based view of language claiming that our linguistic knowledge, from the most concrete level to the most abstract, derives from usage. Cognitive Linguistics further emphasizes the symbolic nature of grammar, which is viewed not as an autonomous system of representation, but rather as an inventory of symbolic units that organize conceptual content in a conventional manner. Each symbolic form thus captures some socio-physical or conceptual human experience.

3CogniTextes welcomes contributions that explore the non-autonomous and usage-based nature of language. Contributions may be papers reporting on language-specific or typological phenomena, on psycho-linguistic or corpus-based studies, on anthropological or theoretically-oriented investigations. The range of topics is virtually open-ended and the journal does not impose any a priori thematic constraint as long as the submissions are original papers finding their place in a usage-based, symbolic view on language. Of particular interest are papers on the general cognitive organisation of linguistic structure (categorisation, metaphor and metonymy, lexical and constructional polysemy, etc.); typological and psycho-linguistic studies probing into linguistic variation and its relation to conceptualisation and thought; studies on signed languages and co-verbal gestures; diachronic and synchronic corpus-based studies; studies on the interaction between grammar and lexicon; papers on the semantics-pragmatics interface; papers on first or second language acquisition. As its name suggests, CogniTextes also welcomes papers on stylistics and discourse structure from a cognitive perspective.

4Cognitive Linguistics is to some degree compatible with certain cognitivist theories developed in France over the past decades, such as the Theory of Meta-Operations, the Theory of Enunciative Operations and the recent Theory of Semantic Forms. The journal particularly welcomes contributions that explore points of convergence and/or divergence between these approaches and Cognitive Linguistics, which can directly contribute to a better mutual understanding and thus to a fruitful scientific exchange.

  • 1 A selection of other papers from this conference is published in an on-line collective volume edit (...)

5This first issue of CogniTextes contains three papers selected from the first AFliCo conference “From Gram to Mind” held in Bordeaux, France, in 2005.1 The article by Heine and Miyashita examines the grammaticalisation of German drohen (‘threaten’) and concludes that the evidence for subjectification and attenuation (two notions used in cognitive-linguistics approaches to account for conceptual differences) may not be sufficient for this particular verb in contemporary German. The study by Paul Sambre considers the conceptual variation of the seemingly ‘empty’ verb être, as it is used in definitions. Based on an extensive corpus study, Sambre succeeds in revealing the conceptual functions of the attested variations. Finally, the paper by Paulo Carvalho on the grammatical category “number” in different languages aims to establish some parallels between Langacker’s cognitive grammar approach to the phenomenon and that adopted in the “modèle psycho-méchanique” of the French linguist Gustave Guillaume.

6CogniTextes is probably one of the first peer-reviewed journals in Cognitive Linguistics with broad scope that is exclusively available on-line (even though the possibility of paper copies is being evaluated and should be possible, especially for thematic issues). As such, we hope that it will become an innovative forum offering several advantages to the Cognitive Linguistics community. Not only is on-line publication much faster, it also offers new technical possibilities, such as the integration of audio-visual material within an article. This opens up new ways of publishing articles on, for example, signed languages and co-verbal gestures. Moreover, full access to all articles in the journal is free of charge, which ensures a maximally large international potential readership. Articles may be in English or French.

7At this point, Cognitextes will only publish full articles, although in the future it may include book reviews, squibs or critical comments to articles published in earlier issues. Obviously, the journal will also welcome guest-edited thematic issues. Detailed submission guidelines can be found on these pages (see "Soumissions").

8The editorial board hopes that CogniTextes will become a forum for high quality scholarship and thereby a constructive meeting ground for cognitive linguists of all hues.

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Notes

1 A selection of other papers from this conference is published in an on-line collective volume edited by J.R. Lapaire, G. Desagulier and J.B. Guignard (Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, http://pub.u-bordeaux3.fr/publication-electronique/). The editorial board express their gratitude to the editors of this collective volume for having three papers published in CogniTextes.

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Référence électronique

Maarten Lemmens, « Editorial statement »CogniTextes [En ligne], Volume 1 | 2007, mis en ligne le 18 mars 2009, consulté le 19 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cognitextes/115 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cognitextes.115

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Auteur

Maarten Lemmens

Editor-in-Chief
Université Lille 3
B.P. 60149, 59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex, France
maarten.lemmens@univ-lille3.fr

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