Linguagem e Cognição: A Perspectiva da Linguística Cognitiva (review)

This volume comprises five sections organized around the following general headings: theory and models, lexicology and semantics, metaphor, grammar, and psycholinguistics and neuroscience. All of the articles in the volume resulted from presentations at the conference Language and Cognition: The Cognitive Linguistics Perspective held in Braga, Portugal, in 2000. This is a multilingual book (with papers in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish) meant to popularize cognitive linguistics (CL) and make known the overall growth of work being done within this framework in Europe, especially in Portugal and Spain, in the past decade.

As its subtitle indicates, the book illustrates the several analytical possibilities afforded by the CL framework, and it is quite successful in doing so, given the variety and depth of research discussed. The introduction written by Augusto Soares (1–16) presents the basic tenets of CL as well as an updated view of the progress that has been achieved within this framework as it becomes popular in linguistic circles, followed by a list of important references in the area. The first section in the book (17–76) groups three theory-ground setting articles by Ronald Langacker, Dirk Geeraerts, and Per Aage Brandt. In the first one, Langacker explores the role that visual experience plays with respect to perception and conceptualization in cognition generally, and in language in particular. He then explores the several grammatical and semantic phenomena within his cognitive grammar framework. Geeraerts explores the importance of the development of sociolexicological studies within CL and its contributions to sociolinguistic research as a whole. Brandt advances his cognitive semiotics perspective and further refines mental spaces and blending theories through the introduction of ‘relevance space’. All of the other papers in the book are in one way or another connected to this first section in that they are applications, reviews, or discussions of the theory.

Papers in the second section (77–237) are grouped around lexicology and semantics and explore topics such as euphemisms, prepositional inventories, grammaticalization processes, polysemy, special configurations, prototype semantics, and action and motion verbs. The third section (240–73) includes a paper focusing on metaphor analysis based on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s conceptual integration theory, along with a morephilosophical exploration of metaphor vis-à-vis Donald Davidson’s pragmatism. The focus on grammar in the fourth section (275–421) covers phenomena such as reference, anaphor, modality and evidential utterances, grammatical categories, diathesis and voice, and causative and inchoative constructions. The fifth part of the book (423–514) is dedicated to studies that focus on approaches to psycholinguistics and neurosciences and their implications for CL.

The broad range of themes and methodologies within CL presented in this volume will certainly elicit interest from linguists who are trying to familiarize themselves with this framework. Other than its solid academic and theoretical value, one of this book’s major contributions is in making authors in the Portuguese/Spanish-speaking world known to an international readership in linguistics.