After decades dominated by a focus on the “individual speaker” and the “mind/brain” in both generative and cognitive linguistics, recent years have reinstated an older view on language as primarily social, i.e. as taking place between people more than within them. Within such a social conception of language, it is natural to reconsider the notion of language norm, but there have been few efforts in this direction. Two eminent exceptions are Eugenio Coseriu and Esa Itkonen, whose approaches to linguistic normativity we here focus on. Even given a combination of their insights, we find that some puzzles remain, especially concerning the question where language norms derive from. We pose this question in the spirit of (generative) phenomenology where the task is “precisely to inquire after how historical and intersubjective structures themselves become meaningful at all, how these structures are and can be generated” (Steinbock 2003: 300). Following earlier work where we have argued for the value of a phenomenological approach to language, we show how the philosophical tradition emanating from Edmund Husserl can both help resolve conceptual puzzles surrounding language norms and clear up the ground for further empirical studies.
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2024. Enhanced agency and the visual thinking of design. Cognitive Semiotics 17:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Oakley, Todd & Jordan Zlatev
2024. Origins of money: a Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) analysis. Semiotica 2024:257 ► pp. 1 ff.
Orrù, Alice
2024. A case study of Eco’s notion of encyclopedia: the (ethno)racial lexicon and its semantic sphere. Semiotica 2024:260 ► pp. 179 ff.
Zlov, Vladislav & Jordan Zlatev
2024. A cognitive-semiotic approach to impoliteness: Effects of conventionality and semiotic system on judgements of impoliteness by Russian and Swedish speakers. Journal of Politeness Research 20:2 ► pp. 249 ff.
2023. Challenges for non-English speakers: inter- and intralingual factors shaping the writing of Ukrainian authors in biologial sciences. Studia Biologica 17:3 ► pp. 167 ff.
Palo, Marina De
2023. An “I” Locked in a Barrel “Would Not Know How to Speak”: Field of Experience, Dialogue, and Encroachment in Merleau-Ponty. Histoire Épistémologie Langage :45-1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Zlatev, Jordan
2023. The Intertwining of Bodily Experience and Language: The Continued Relevance of Merleau-Ponty. Histoire Épistémologie Langage :45-1 ► pp. 41 ff.
Zlatev, Jordan
2024. Constraining Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Depiction: A Cognitive Semiotics Approach. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 69:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
Moskaluk, Kalina, Jordan Zlatev & Joost van de Weijer
2022. “Dizziness of Freedom”: Anxiety Disorders and Metaphorical Meaning-making. Metaphor and Symbol 37:4 ► pp. 303 ff.
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