A Cognitive-Neurolinguistic Study of Kuṟiñcippāṭṭu

This paper examines Kuṟiñcippāṭṭu, one of the major poems of the Pattuppāṭṭu corpus traditionally attributed to Kapilar, through the interdisciplinary perspectives of Cognitive Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Cognitive Poetics, and Neurocognitive Poetics. Rather than treating the poem merely as a repository of Sangam landscape imagery and love conventions, the study investigates how linguistic structures may organize perception, memory, emotion, embodiment, conceptual mapping, and aesthetic experience in the reader or listener. The study argues that the tiṇai system in Kuṟiñcippāṭṭu functions as a complex cognitive schema in which geographical environment, sensory imagery, human emotion, social action, and cultural knowledge are integrated into a unified conceptual structure. Mountain, flower, waterfall, animal, season, darkness, and movement do not operate simply as decorative descriptions. They activate interconnected mental representations through which love, anticipation, secrecy, anxiety, social regulation, and emotional transition become intelligible. Using conceptual metaphor theory, embodied cognition, schema theory, discourse processing, and neurocognitive poetics as interpretative frameworks, this paper proposes that Kuṟiñcippāṭṭu can be understood as a sophisticated form of cognitive-cultural communication. The poem demonstrates how poetic language recruits’ sensory simulation, associative memory, affective processing, and culturally shared conceptual frames. The article therefore proposes a Cognitive-Neurolinguistic model for the study of Classical Tamil literature.