Although this book is about language, the first part is not about language as such at all, but about general COGNITION – i.e. ‘knowledge’. Its aim is to provide a general background to the discussion of language in the second part.

Cognition includes everything you might think of as knowledge – knowledge of people, things, events – and may be as general as so-called ‘general knowledge’ or as specific as what you know about the room you're sitting in at the moment. If we want to understand cognition, we must answer questions such as the following:

• How is it organized in our minds?

• How do we learn it?

• How do we use it in understanding our experiences, in solving problems and in planning actions?

• How is it related to things that we wouldn't call ‘knowledge’, such as feelings, actions and perceptions?

The main point of this book is to show how answers to these questions throw light on language; or to put it more negatively, how unlikely we are to understand language if we ignore what's already known about cognition.

Cognition is very complex and diverse, so it's hardly surprising that a range of methods have been used for studying it. The term COGNITIVE SCIENCE is often used as a cover term for the various different disciplines that explore cognition, including psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy and (of course) linguistics. (Wikipedia: ‘Cognitive science’.)