sense of time: "In our visual systems, we have detectors for motion and detectors for objects/locations. We do not have detectors for time (whatever that could mean). Thus, it makes good biological sense that time should be understood in terms of things and motion." —George Lakoff In Cognitive Linguistics, thinking is argued to be mainly automatic and unconscious. Cognitive linguists study the embodiment of knowledge by seeking expressions which relate to modal schemas. For example, in the expression "It is quarter to eleven", the preposition to represents a modal schema which is manifested in language as a visual or sensorimotoric 'metaphor'. Cognitive and construction grammar Constructions, as the basic units of grammar, are conventionalised form–meaning pairings which are comparable to memes as units of linguistic evolution. These are considered multi-layered. For example, idioms are higher-level constructions which contain words as middle-level constructions, and these may contain morphemes as lower-level constructions. It is argued that humans do not only share the same body type, allowing a common ground for embodied representations; but constructions provide common ground for uniform expressions within a speech community. Like biological organisms, constructions have life cycles which are studied by linguists. According to the cognitive and constructionist view, there is no grammar in the traditional sense of the word. What is commonly perceived as grammar is an inventory of constructions; a complex adaptive system; or a population of constructions. Constructions are studied in all fields of language research from language acquisition to corpus linguistics. Integrative cognitive linguistics There is also a third approach to cognitive linguistics, which neither directly supports the modular (Generative Grammar) nor the anti-modular (Cognitive Linguistics) view of the mind. Proponents of the third view argue that, according to brain research, language processing is specialized although not autonomous from other types of information processing. Language is thought of as one of the human cognitive abilities, along with perception, attention, memory, motor skills, and visual and spatial processing, rather than being subordinate to them. Emphasis is laid on a cognitive semantics that studies the contextual–conceptual nature of meaning. Computational approaches Cognitive perspective on natural language processing Cognitive linguistics offers a scientific first principle direction for quantifying states-of-mind through natural language processing. As mentioned earlier Cognitive Linguistics approaches grammar with a nontraditional view. Traditionally grammar has been defined as a set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases and words in a natural language.