Book review

Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics

Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Volume 6/2008. Amsterdam and Phildelphia: John Benjamins

Reviewed by Réka Benczes, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.

According to the John Benjamins homepage, the aim of the Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics is "to establish itself as an international forum for the publication of high-quality original research on all areas of linguistic enquiry from a cognitive perspective." This objective is fully met in the 6th volume on a number of accounts. First of all, the nine papers of the yearbook encompass a wide range of linguistic research: historical linguistics, dialectology, discourse analysis, syntax and morphology among others, all couched within a cognitive framework. At the same time, the volume does indeed live up to its goal of establishing itself as an "international forum": although the authors do not cross-reference one another (which, of course, is not meant as a criticism in any way), they, nevertheless, do engage in a "debate" with one another, and - necessarily - with the reader, too. The general strand of this debate is the need for a constant critical re-evaluation of what cognitive linguistics is and what it can achieve. This constant re-definition of cognitive linguistics and re-establishing its limits can also be considered as the theme of the two interviews included in the volume, with Luc Steels and Adele E. Goldberg, which further reinforce the debate-like nature of the yearbook. All in all, the reader is presented with a volume that, irrespective of the diverse topics and genres, forms a coherent whole. In the following I will give a brief evaluation of the research papers.

The first three papers in the volume (by Molina, Szelid & Geeraerts, and Pascual respectively) investigate the possibilities of how cognitive linguistics can be applied in the (con)textual analysis of language. By "(con)text" I refer to both the immediate textual, the larger situational, and the social and geographical environment. In this vein, Molina examines how prototype theory can be made use of in historical lexicography – thus creating a "bridge" between historical linguistics and cognitive linguistics. She provides a reanalysis of a couple of OED entries based on semantic salience, and contrasts these with the original entries. Her proposal makes the various sense relations immediately overt and at the same time takes up much less space (which is an important factor nowadays for publishers). I can only hope that OED editors will read her article. Szelid & Geeraerts push the boundaries of cognitive linguistics further out by giving the reader an idea of what cognitive dialectology would look like. According to the authors, metaphor variation (and conceptualization) varies not just across but also within cultures, more specifically, within dialects – however, the latter has not been given ample recognition in the literature (as compared to the former). Szelid & Geeraerts investigate to what degree concepts are entrenched in the Hungarian dialect of Moldavian Southern Csángó (spoken in Eastern Romania) in comparison to a dialect spoken in Hungary. What Szelid & Geeraerts demonstrate is that by starting from a traditional dialectological questionnaire, valuable data can indeed be extracted on how people use their language (and not just on the language as such). In her paper, Pascual integrates cognitive linguistics with cognitive sociology and linguistic anthropology. Her focus is on blending theory: how the communicative context (including individual conceptualization) influences and – at the same time – limits blending operations. By analyzing a prosecutor’s closing argument on a high-profile murder case in California, she comes to the conclusion that blending is heavily constrained by contextual and socio-cultural factors (beside the so-called "governing principles" established by Fauconnier and Turner 2002).

The next three contributions in the volume (by Panther & Köpcke, Boas, and Neubauer respectively) shift the focus of research to syntax. Similarly to Molina (the first contributor of the volume), Panther & Köpcke apply prototype theory to solve a problematic area of linguistics, namely, that of defining what a sentence is. As they convincingly argue, a prototypical sentence is a "bundle of morphosyntactic, semantic, pragmatic features that characterize the best exemplar of the category" (p. 84) – which is best exemplified by a declarative sentence type. Boas’s paper is a critical analysis of construction grammar, in which Boas argues that the construction-specific constraints of Goldberg are unable of ruling out unattested sentences and proposes therefore the notion of mini-constructions. Interestingly, this issue is also touched upon by Goldberg herself in the interview conducted with her. Leaving behind the sentence and the verb phrase, Neubauer’s attention shifts to the noun phrase and anaphors: she investigates why language users often employ they as an anaphora of singular antecedents. She comes to the conclusion that the notion of anaphora as a "replacement of NPs has to be radically changed" (p. 164): the relationship between an anaphora is not one-directional (as formerly claimed to be), but bi-directional in the sense that it is in fact capable of contributing further information about its antecedent.

The last three contributions (by Kövecses, Nuyts, and Barcelona respectively) cannot actually be subsumed under one particular theme, but join, nevertheless, into the "forum" introduced by the earlier articles. Kövecses’s paper is a rebuttal to the various criticisms conceptual metaphor theory (i.e., CMT, as proposed originally by Lakoff and Johnson 1980) has faced in the past years. Kövecses tackles perhaps five of the most prevalent ones (that of methodology, the direction of analysis, the schematicity of conceptual metaphors, embodiment, and the relationship between metaphor and culture). His claim that conceptualization is not based on "ready-made and/or universal metaphors" (p. 181), as the pressure of the context – in its broadest of interpretations – heavily limits and constrains our selection of metaphors, can be considered as a direct reflection on Szelid & Geeraerts’ and Pascual’s argumentation. Following Panther & Köpcke, Nuyts also calls for a re-examination – or rather a redefinition – of a linguistic category, that of modality. Nuyts analyzes modal meaning as a "chain of cognitive operations" (p. 202) and claims that language (grammar) cannot be adequately examined without taking a "processual perspective" (p. 203) into account. It does not do justice to the last contribution, by Barcelona, to call it simply a "paper". With its approximately 70 pages it is rather a comprehensive survey on a neglected area of morphology: bahuvrihi (metonymical) compounds. Barcelona’s detailed analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the creation of bahuvrihis will doubtlessly serve as a reference point for the growing number of researchers in the field of cognitive word formation.

The brief evaluations above have aimed to show the cross-referential nature of the volume, which is indeed a remarkable feature in the case of a yearbook. I am very much looking forward to the next volume.

References

Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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