Abstract:
Modern linguists consider that the science about the language is concentrated onto two main perspectives: the functional linguistics and the cognitive linguistics. The two perspectives combine when we conduct a contrastive research of various languages. The linguists dealing in functional linguistics define the language as a functional system of the means of their expression, the mechanism of which has a particular purposefulness in the field of cognition and its description while the adherents of cognitive linguistics look at the language as at an instrument of cognition(perception) oriented to code and transform the information. The purposefulness of cognitive linguistics is concerned with the correlation between the language and conscience, the conceptualization and the dissociation of the world by means of the language in the process of cognition. A contrastive study demonstrates multiple possibilities to express similar cognitive meanings and communicative functions. The common aspect of the languages manifested by variety is the axis of the contrastive studies and by using this method we combine approaches from the two perspectives of linguistics. In the given paper we are interested in the research conducted by the adherents of cognitive linguistics, the methods they use in conducting cross-cultural studies which imply contrastive analysis and the conclusions concerning the quality of the applied methodology this being a weaker side of the new domain of studies according to the point of view of many linguists that represent functional linguistics perspective.