Book review

Cognitive English Grammar

Radden, Günter, and René Dirven. 2007. Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam and Phildelphia: John Benjamins

Reviewed by Patrycja Kamińska, Szczecin University

Cognitive English Grammar has been written as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of English grammar and linguistics. The book is divided into 12 self-contained chapters that cover different aspects of cognitive-linguistic theory. The book as a whole is organized into four parts.

Part I provides a comprehensive description of the cognitive framework and introduces the key notions of the book. Chapter 1 discusses the notion of categories and addresses the cognitive processes that operate on them. Chapter 2 presents three types of cognitive operations that are deemed necessary for successful communication: construal of thought, building of mental spaces, and inferencing. In Chapter 3, the authors demonstrate how conceptual units and their linguistic counterparts are combined to create complex ideas and grammatical structures.

Part II is devoted to a discussion of how "things" function in the conceptual world of humans. As "things" correspond to the word class of nouns, Chapter 4 investigates them as conceptual categories expressed as count and mass nouns. Reference to entities through grounding by means of determiners is discussed in Chapter 5, while set and scalar quantification is dealt with in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 describes types of qualification by means of modifiers and concludes the second part of the book.

Part III deals with temporal and aspectual categories. The authors make a broad distinction between progressive and non-progressive aspect and elaborate on this distinction in Chapter 8. Next, the system of tenses is discussed in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 deals with different types of modality in English from the perspective of Cognitive Grammar.

Part IV discusses how the conceptual structure of situations is reflected in grammatical structure. Chapter 11 illustrates how conceptual schemas such as the emotion schema, the action schema and the transfer schema find their expression in basic sentence patterns, such as intransitive, transitive and ditransitive constructions. Chapter 12 is devoted to the system of spatial relations, discussing amongst other things metaphorically extended senses of spatial prepositions.

One of the features that makes Cognitive English Grammar particularly useful as a textbook is the user-friendly presentation of information. Each part starts with a short rationale for its existence in the book. The chapters are divided into subsections that make it easy to follow the general progression of the argument. Each chapter ends with a summary that highlights the most important aspects discussed. Important terms used in the chapters can be found in the glossary, which comes in handy for a quick reference to previously introduced terms. Suggestions for further reading, including bibliographical references to relatively recent publications, are provided at the end of each chapter.

The fact that each chapter is accompanied by study questions (with the key available online) makes Cognitive English Grammar a truly user-friendly textbook, not only for students but also for teachers. The questions are useful as review points, but may equally well provide the students with food for thought that can be an incentive for additional library research on their part -- especially in the case of Part III and Part IV.

Cognitive English Grammar can further serve the purpose of a reference book for students of English as a foreign language. The discussion of the use of determiners based on types of reference deserves particular praise. Determiners have been notorious for causing a lot of trouble, even to advanced English learners, but the explanation of determiner use based on the features of boundedness and uniqueness allows students to see the systematicity in referencing and obviates the necessity of learning the principles of article application by heart.

The book is written in comprehensible language: the authors use appropriate terminology, but avoid specialist jargon. The illustrations make the reading more attractive, and at the same time clarify the discussed issues. Some minor errors (such as the use of the words "harmful/harmless" in the figure on page 32, or the spelling mistake on page 131) can be detected, but in no way spoil the otherwise perfect impression we get after reading Radden and Dirven's work.

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