Defining 'Cognitive Typology'

[Wolfgang Schulze]

Dear typologists,

as you all will probably know there will be a conference held in Antwerp
in April entitled 'International Cognitive Typology Conference '. The
purpose of this conference is to

> ... is to bring together researchers from the
> field of linguistic typology and from the domain of cognitive approaches
> to language (broadly defined) to reflect on how the typological and the
> cognitive enterprises in language research interrelate, what they have to
> offer each other, and/or how they can join forces in view of their shared
> goal of achieving an explanatory account of language.
>
If I understand the wordings correctly the term 'Cognitive Typology' is
used in a rather informal and undefined way: In this sense, 'Cognitive
Typology' (CT) seems to refer to a possible interface between
typological and cognitive enterprises. As far as I know, the term CT
hasn't been used before. My question now is twofold:

a) Does anyone know of the use of the term CT prior to the announcement
of the Antwerp conference? If yes: How is the term defined in this
source?

b) In my eyes, CT still lacks a programmatic specification that goes
beyond the above mentioned quote from the Antwerp announcement (I myself
have tried to contextualize the term CT in a book prospectus which you
can look up under http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/gss_main.html).
This situation could give us the chance to scientifically define a
research program CT _before_ the term acquires a popular (and fuzzy)
reading. So I would be very thankful, if you could provide me with a
tentative definition of the term CT just as it comes into your mind
(definitions should not exceed two sentences; they can simply
circumscribe what you think CT is or what connotations are activated
when reading/hearing this term). I would collect the proposals and would
post them on the list in case there is a sufficient number of
reactions.

Best regards
Wolfgang
--
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Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 München
Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345
Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
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