Cognitive Linguistics: Retrospect and prospect

As a new paradigm of linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics has made great achievements over the past 30 years or so. In order to make the latest trends of Cognitive Linguistic research known, this paper presents the outstanding achievements and prominent characteristics of Cognitive Linguistics in various dimensions. In contrast to some other linguistic theories, Cognitive Linguistics has more conspicuous advantages in its theories and other aspects. Cognitive linguistics can offer not only an account of linguistic phenomena but also that of a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. Therefore, Cognitive Linguistics is not only a school of linguistics but a cognitive social science or a cognitive semiotics, which has lots of implications for various fields or disciplines in the age of big data.