A Cognitive Approach to the Verb: Morphological and Constructional Perspectives (review)

These thirteen papers were presented at ‘The Verb in Cognitive Grammar: Morphological, Semantic, and Syntactic Aspects’ conference (Gran, Norway, 1998). They cover a variety of research areas, such as acquisition, processing, and typology, in a selection of languages, but with special emphasis on Norwegian.

The volume is organized into three sections. Section 1, ‘Basic issues’, contains two theoretical papers presented by the keynote speakers. Ronald W . Langacker discusses the special relationship among topic, subject, and possessor in terms of their affinities and their nonequivalence. Richard A. Hudson develops the central idea of language as a cognitive network. He argues that language can be seen as part of the ‘sprawling network’ of cognition, with further subnetworks and sub-subnetworks, all organized along the same lines and sharing nodes with other subnetworks.

Section 2 contains six papers, most of them on Norwegian, dealing with morphological aspects of the verb. The editors present an overview of the Norwegian system of verb classes, including a summary of South East Norwegian phonology. Helge Gundersen discusses some problems related to morphological segmentation in a comparison between the building block model and the network model in cognitive linguistics.

The remaining papers in this section focus on the acquisition of past tense inflection of verbs. Hanne Simonsen argues that the acquisition of past tense forms by Norwegian 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds is determined by input factors such as the phonological properties of the verb and their type and token frequencies. Kirsten Meyer Bjerkan discusses individual variation in past tense inflection in children with specific language impairments. Anders Nøklestad builds up a connectionist model of past tense acquisition in Norwegian based on previous experiments. Paola F. Matcovich investigates the acquisition and processing of Italian verb forms by 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds and adults, respectively. She argues in favor of a single mechanism model as she finds no qualitative difference between regular and irregular inflection.

The papers in Section 3 deal with constructional aspects of the verb. Ole Torfinn Fagerli analyzes the expression of benefactive and malefactive by means of the verb give in some African languages. Hans-Olav Enger and Tore Nesset compare the Norwegian and Russian reflexive-middle-passive systems and argue that the categorization networks of cognitive grammar are valuable for the typological study of voice systems. In addition, Enger focuses on the Norwegian reflexive-middle-passive marker -s and discusses whether the various -s markers are polysemously related or mere homonyms. Kristian Emil Kristoffersen investigates the relationship between argument control and transitivity in a study of the Norwegian verb love ‘promise’ in a construction grammar framework.

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the state of research in cognitive linguistics in Norway. It brings forth interesting analyses of morphological and constructional aspects of the verb as well as studies on the acquisition of past tense.