In this article, I want to put forward the following argument: Cognitive Linguistics-after a long hegemony of Chomskyan formalist linguistics-has offered models of language as "motivated" by general and prior cognitive abilities; as such it has been able to provide representations of a much wider range of linguistic phenomena (both grammatical and lexical); however, the "human face" of Cognitive Linguistics is that of a generic human being rather than that of actual people: members of

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... social communities in which languages develop through "figuration" and "articulation".