Historical Semantics and Cognition (review)

This is a collection of papers presented at a symposium held September 1996 at the Freie Universität Berlin. As the ‘Preface’ (v) states, the goal of the gathering was to stimulate an exchange of ideas from both sides of the Atlantic as well as from an interaction of synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The latter intention was perhaps the more ambitious; while linguists cross the Atlantic quite frequently (although we do not as a rule cross the divide, at least as great as the ocean, between functionalism and formalism), those studying diachronic questions do not often meet with the larger number of synchronic specialists. In the words of the editors (v), the ‘expected synergetic effects were perhaps not as intensive as we had hoped’. They end the ‘Preface’, in fact, with the further hope that discussions begun at the symposium will bring longer-term results. The papers may perhaps not have had that desired result; while they represent solid work by respected scholars, on the whole they will not be exciting to those who follow cognitive analyses. It is unfortunately tempting to suspect that the contributors on the whole made small adjustments to previous work rather than developing new and more provocative material. There are, nonetheless, some very good papers here which bear consideration.

The ‘Introduction’ (1–14) takes up the editors’ view of the difference between European and American structural semantics, with the former approach contrastively calling for a clear separation between encyclopedic knowledge and language-specific semantic features. This view can be compared particularly with the place of encyclopedic semantics in cognitive linguistics as developed in the United States. The distinction, they conclude, is worth maintaining although the difference resides more in the degree of importance placed on the encyclopedic (universal) vs. the particular rather than in any intrinsic difference between them. For the very central phenomenon of categorization, they state that they take prototype theoretical approaches for granted, but also argue for conceptual networks and profiling of some sections of the semantic set. This last point is of particular interest in some papers at the end of the volume which discuss the grounding role of the body.

Of particular interest in the ‘Introduction’ is the overview of recent trends in diachronic semantics. First it is important to acknowledge the role of pragmatics in order to gain insight into the speaker’s and—as has become evident even more recently—hearer’s role. Next the editors briefly mention the concept of invisible hand processes (Keller and material stemming from his 1994 book) which they attribute more to Europe than to North America. Finally, they touch on the increasing interest in grammaticalization, both from semasiological and onomasiological perspectives.

Section 1, ‘Theories and models’, contains five papers, of which the first, by John Taylor, is in some ways the broadest in the entire volume. Taylor contrasts cognitive grammar, his particular approach to linguistic analysis, with structural linguistics. Exemplifying the latter, which has a wide range of theoretical manifestations, he has chosen the work of Eugenio Coseriu (and particularly 1977, 1990) as the model. Here is, indeed, one area where North American theorists are quite different from their European colleagues: Coseriu is not much read on this side of the Atlantic, even, I would venture, among nonformalists. His work would not come to mind as an obvious example of structural linguistics even if the field were narrowed to European structuralism. This is not to say, however, that the Taylor paper is not good; on the contrary it makes for a useful introduction to an insufficiently known (by North Americans) body of work.

Other papers in the section are not as far-reaching. Helmut Lüdtke reconsiders diachronic questions of actuation and spread, using some very standard examples from the history of the Romance languages (the etymology of French aujourd’hui ‘today’ and the evolution of the verb ‘to go’ in French and Italian...