Book review

Subjectification

Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis, and Bert Cornillie (eds). 2006. Subjectification. Various paths to subjectivity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reviewed by Karolina Krawczak, Adam Mickiewicz University.

Subjectification. Various paths to subjectivity is a collection of twelve articles concerning objectivity, (inter)subjectivity and their interactions. It is divided into four sections, entitled respectively (1) Large theoretical issues, (2) Case studies I - Modals and modality, (3) Case studies II - Adjectives, and (4) Syntax and semantics. Each section includes three papers. The articles are preceded by the editors' introduction and followed by both author and subject indexes.

In the introduction, the editors acknowledge the prominence of Traugott's and Langacker's research into subjectivity and discuss their basic assumptions. They also inform the reader that the frameworks will be treated separately, with relevant analogies being pointed out. The divergence of the two approaches is pinpointed here as the role of the hearer, which is argued to be of lesser importance in Langacker's research.

The theoretical section starts with Langacker's contribution Subjectification, grammaticization, and conceptual archetypes. It outlines recent developments in his approach, in which subjectivity designates the process of semantic bleaching. Langacker illustrates his approach with an array of examples ranging from markers of modality, aspectual 'going to', virtual motion, and prepositions. Bisard's paper Logic, subjectivity, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction juxtaposes the frameworks of Langacker and Traugott. The latter seems to him to have two basic faults, namely, the "process-oriented", psychological perception of the subject as the speaker, and the undetermined nature of inferences yielding subjective expressions. The question remains though, why functional constructs should ever correspond to cognitive ones. Besides, it is not really the speaker that is attenuated in Langacker's terms, but the syntactic subject, which does make a difference insofar as the role of the speaker indeed increases together with subjectification of an element. Uehara in Toward a typology of linguistic subjectivity sets out to answer the query posed by Lyons as to whether there are cross-linguistic differences relative to subjectivity, thereby proposing a synchronically-orientated "subjectivity typology". In so doing, Uehara adopts Langacker's conceptual framework for a cross-linguistic examination of deictic expressions, including motion events, internal states and nominal reference. He identifies subjective- and objective-frame languages, the former exemplified by Japanese, the latter by English, neither being a definite endpoint on the scale.

Pelyvás in Subjectification in (expressions) of epistemic modality and the development of the grounding predication shows that grounding predications should include only epistemic modals and epistemic cognitive predicates. Mortelmans in Langacker's 'subjectification' and 'grounding' indicates that despite a lower degree of grammaticalization in German modals, some of them can be characterized as grounding predications in certain environments, thus rejecting a dichotomous analysis in favor of a more nuanced approach. She enumerates five parameters affecting subjectification of modals: co-text, sentence type, use of explicit hedges, negation and morphology. Likewise, Cornillie's Conceptual and constructional considerations on the subjectivity of English and Spanish modals demonstrates that their formal heterogeneity notwithstanding, Spanish epistemic modals manifest considerable subjectivity, dynamically referring the decoder to the infinitival process. This, he claims, sets them apart from their deontic equivalents.

Athanasiadou's Adjectives and subjectivity constitutes a semantically motivated analysis of the distribution of English adjectives. It distinguishes four adjective types: scalar, event-like, thing-like, determiner-like, and three positions: premodifier, postmodifier and predicative, assigning each one a dissimilar construal and subjectivity level. Grammaticalization and subjectification of the English adjectives of general comparison, by Breban, focuses on the polysemy of English general comparison adjectives, whose semantics oscillates between the lexical and textual. The latter meanings, functioning as postdeterminers or classifiers, are shown to have sprung from grammaticalization and subjectification of the former attributive ones. Both Traugott's and Langacker's approaches are employed to account for the phenomenon - the one explaining the speaker's increased discursive engagement/control, the other the desemanticization of an element. Maat's Subjectification in gradable adjectives discusses gradable adjectives without comparative or superlative modification against a background of ten conceptual and positional features. This cognitively motivated analysis shows that such adjectives are not only scalar, but also subjectively construed and interpreted as implicitly referring to something, the reference point being an abstractly understood context wherein a given characteristic is inconspicuous. It is also postulated that grading, rather than inhering in a group of adjectives, is a subjective mechanism applicable to non-gradable adjective uses as well.

On subjectivity and 'long-distance Wh-movement', by Verhagen, concentrates on two planes of subjectivity determining the "basic construal configuration" - one concerning the subject-object asymmetry, the other the intersubjective relation of conceptualizations, enhanced e.g. by hedges. His corpus-based study shows that 'long Wh-movement' prototypically co-occurs with 'think' and second-person pronouns, while possible deviations concern only one of the two elements. Nikiforidou in Subjective construal and factual interpretation in sentential complements investigates Greek pu 'that' complementation through Langacker's theory. The study focuses on the occurrence of the said complementizer with 'remember', 'forget' and perception verbs. Its use signals implicitly the conceptualizer's direct experience of the conceptualized object and entails factual interpretation. Company's Zero in syntax, ten in pragmatics demonstrates on the basis of Spanish that subjectification entails syntactic restriction or loss.

What seems to be missing from the collection is a contribution by Elizabeth Traugott. This would be in order, given the editors' commitment to juxtapose and/or reconcile the two major approaches to subjectivity. The articles themselves also tend toward Langacker's framework, thus rendering the other one rather underrepresented. Also, it seems at least debatable whether Langacker's approach really assigns lesser significance to intersubjectivity, or the role of the hearer, than Traugott's approach, since Langacker's conceptualizer comprises both roles of speaker and hearer. Moreover, the functional "commitment to the likelihood" of an event is not at all nonexistent in Langacker, as claimed here. Rather, it takes the form of "mental extrapolation". Other than that, the contributions in this volume are all informative and insightful in their treatment of the matter. The book makes compulsory reading for anyone interested in subjectification and its attendant phenomena.

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