Book review

A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English

Heyvaert, Liesbet. 2003. A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reviewed by Remi van Trijp, Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris.

A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English aims to develop a new approach to the analysis of nominalization. The book takes on this challenge in three parts. In the first part, a general-descriptive model is mapped out for analyzing language and nominalization in particular. The two subsequent parts are case studies, in which the model is applied to deverbal -er nominalization (e.g. bake -> baker) and three types of factive nominalization (e.g. [That he managed to do it] surprised everyone). Heyvaert's study proves to be - to say it with a deverbal nominalization - a real eye-opener.

Part I: Towards a theoretical-descriptive approach to nominalization

The first part of the book is a general theoretical description of the study. Heyvaert explains the used methodology and how the functional approaches of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991) and Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday 1994) are combined in it. The clear structure and style of the writing allows researchers who are familiar with both theories to easily skim through these pages without missing important parts.

After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 gives an overview of the theoretical assumptions of the cognitive-functional framework. Here, a radical functional approach to language is presented and notions such as 'rank shift', 'multifunctionality' and the 'intrinsic functionality of language' are introduced. This chapter follows a usage-based approach to language and discusses the notions of 'agnation' and 'enation' (Gleason (1965), which pertain to relations between constructions. A relationship of 'enation' holds between constructions with identical structures but different meanings, while 'agnation' describes a relation between constructions with similar meanings but different structures. The most important assumption, however, is the existence of a functional hierarchy or rank scale on which constructions are situated. This hierarchy allows the researcher to study constructions as combinations of internal and external functions.

Chapter 3 then confronts the framework with previous descriptions of nominalization. Especially the observation that constructions have both internal and external functionality exposes the weak points of previous analyses. Heyvaert shows how most approaches have treated nominalizations as 'impoverished clauses' or have only taken the external functionality of nominalizations into account. She argues that nominalizations are constructional in nature and that few attempts have been made to investigate how they map meaning onto form. In Chapter 4, the idea of nominalizations as functional configurations is elaborated and the chapter completes the theoretical framework put forward in this book.

Part II: Deverbal -er nominalization

The second part of the book presents a case study on deverbal -er nominalization. In Chapter 5, Heyvaert first gives a critical overview of the most important studies on this type of nominalization. Here, she claims that deverbal -er nominalization started out as an agentive system (e.g. baker, fire-fighter, etc.) but that it cannot be characterized as such anymore (e.g. bestseller). Instead, she hypothesizes that the system has evolved to one that is profiling subjects rather than agents - very much like the Prague school has claimed that English has evolved from an agent-oriented language to a subject-oriented language (p. 123). That hypothesis is further investigated in the following chapters.

Chapter 6 explores the English Middle Construction (e.g. The book sells well). Heyvaert gives compelling evidence that there is a link between the Middle Construction and non-agentive deverbal -er nominalization, even though both constructions have their own schemata. Again using agnation as a tool, she shows how these constructions are more systematically related with each other than assumed before. The data also support her hypothesis that deverbal -er nominalization is essentially a subject-profiling construction, as indeed bestseller can be related to profiling the subject of a sentence like the book sells well.

Both chapters 5 and 6 offer a more accurate description of deverbal -er nominalization, which Heyvaert then incorporates in Chapter 7. This chapter identifies the high-level schemas that instantiate -er nominalizations. The multifunctional approach offered here goes beyond traditional representational semantics, and also includes a constructional and textual analysis of nominalization. Heyvaert not only gives strong arguments for her subject-profiling hypothesis, but also couples -er nominalizations to Langacker's identification of nominal functions such as type specification, instantiation and grounding.

Part III: Factive nominalization

The part on factive nominalization is organized in the same way as the case study on -er nominalization: Chapter 8 gives a critical overview of the literature and explains the theoretical position that is taken in this book. Heyvaert continues with a functional analysis of nominalizations as nominal constructions (Chapter 9). Again, the theoretical framework - especially the functional configuration of nominalizations in a functional hierarchy - allows her to shed new light on factive nominalizations. Whereas previous studies mainly focused on the external functionality of these nominalizations, Heyvaert addresses their internal functionality as well and relates this to (a refined version of) Langacker's analysis of action nominalizations, gerundive nominalizations and that-structures. The data presented in this part support Heyvaert's claim that factive nominalization involves a functional reclassification whereby not only the external, but also the internal nominal functions are reclassified.

The last chapter concludes and points forward to further research. As the author acknowledges herself (p. 253), her two case studies only tell part of the story, but open up a range of new questions. It would definitely be worthwhile to continue this line of work and also to investigate how well the framework translates itself to the study of nominalization in other languages.

Evaluation

As already mentioned in the introduction, this book is an eye-opener in many aspects. Heyvaert shows how the combination of cognitive and functional approaches makes it possible to move beyond existing analyses and reach a deeper understanding of nominalization. It provides cognitive linguists with a clear idea of the complexity of language usage, and at the same time shows functionalists the importance of the cognitive apparatus and how it may constrain the linguistic system. The main merit of this book, however, does not lie in providing a theoretical framework, but in its two case studies. Here, Heyvaert addresses the missing parts of previous descriptions and moves well beyond that. Moreover, using agnation as a heuristic and theoretical tool, she provides a dialogue between theory and evidence, rather than fitting the data into the framework.

This does not mean that the last word has been said about nominalization in English, though. As the author points out herself, the model is likely to change when the framework is applied to other types of nominalization (see also Heyvaert 2006 for a recent study). But also the analyses in this study sometimes suffer from overgeneralizations. In the case of deverbal -er nominalization, for instance, a distinction is made between two very broad categories of 'agentive' and 'non-agentive' nominalizations. As Heyvaert points out herself, these are very broad categories and contain all sorts of subcategories. It seems to me, however, that her 'agentive' category is a bit overstretched, containing undergoers such as senser, experiencer, receiver, etc. Due to the vagueness of this description, Heyvaert's study fails to account for the ungrammaticality of nominalizations of existence and disappearance such as ? dier, *exister and *dissapearer (p. 116-117). A deeper look into these categories, combined with perhaps more attention for the procedures of nominalization (also see Nuyts 1992 for a more procedural view on language and cognition), would prove to be interesting. But apart from these remarks, one can only say that this study reaches deeper into the phenomenon of nominalization than previous attempts and that it is a clear step forward in the field.

References

Gleason, Henry A. 1965. Linguistics and English Grammar. London: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Halliday, Michael A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.

Heyvaert, Liesbet. 2006. A symbolic approach to deverbal -ee derivation. Cognitive Linguistics 17(3), 337-364.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nuyts, Jan. 1992. Aspects of a Cognitive-Pragmatic Theory of Language. On Cognition, Functionalism, and Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Links

© 2002-present ICLA; all rights reserved.
Site admin information and contact