Cognitive Linguistics and Non-Indo-European Languages (review)

This book is a collection of papers presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, 1999. In each of the sixteen papers, the cognitive linguistics approach is applied to at least one non-Indo-European language, exploring and testing its potential. The editors’ somewhat lengthy introduction describes and contrasts the papers in topical order. This introduction is followed by the contributions which are ordered language-geographically.

Six papers are concerned with ‘Metaphor, metonymy, polysemy and cultural models’. David Tuggy discusses the phonological forms and the functions of ‘Reduplication in Nahuatl’. In her paper, ‘Conceptual metaphors motivating the use of Thai “face”’, Margaret Ukosakul gives a detailed account of the usage of ‘face’ connected to the concepts honor and shame. In ‘Animism exploits linguistic phenomena’, Rudy Barlaan analyzes a system of taboo words and their substitute forms in Isnag. Gary Palmer discusses ‘The Tagalog prefix category PAG-: Metonymy, polysemy, and voice’. In ‘Conceptual structure of numeral classifiers in Thai’, Douglas Inglis analyzes the semantics of the morphemes bay/lûuk. Finally, Ning Yu discusses ‘The bodily dimension of meaning in Chinese: What do we do and mean with “hands”?’.

‘Causativity, voice, subjectivity and reference points’ are addressed by three papers: Kingkarn Thepkanjana provides ‘A cognitive account of the causative/inchoative alternation in Thai’. Foong-Ha Yap and Shoichi Iwasaki’s paper, ‘From causatives to passives: A passage in some East and Southeast Asian languages’, is a comparative study, concentrating on ‘give’ and ‘let’ morphemes. Mari Siiroinen discusses the connection between ‘Subjectivity and the use of Finnish emotive verbs’.

Another three papers deal with ‘Nominals: Salience, polysemy and prototypicality’: Kenneth Cook discusses ‘Hawaiian ‘o as an indicator of nominal salience’. Satoshi Uehara analyzes ‘Zibun reflexivization in Japanese’. The last paper on this topic, by David Beck, is concerned with ‘Conceptual autonomy and the typology of parts of speech in Upper Necaxa Totonac and other languages’.

‘Spatial semantics: Locatives’ is the topic of three contributions: Eugene Casad’s paper, ‘Speakers, context, and Cora conceptual metaphors’, deals with metaphors for failures; Rick Floyd discusses ‘Completion, comas and other “downers”: Observations on the semantics of the Wanca Quechua directional suffix -lpu’; and Jordan Zlatev provides a discussion of ‘Holistic spatial semantics of Thai’. Finally, the comparative paper by Kaoru Horie critically examines ‘What cognitive linguistics can reveal about complementation in non-IE languages: Case studies from Japanese and Korean’.

Ordering the papers of this volume topically instead of geographically would have resulted in a clearer structure; it would have been much easier for a reader to find and compare papers on the same topic. To show the geographical range covered by these papers, a table in the introduction with the necessary geographic information would have been sufficient. This volume will be of interest to linguists with a thorough background in cognitive linguistics. It presents a variety of interesting data and aims to provide further proof for the crosslinguistic value of this approach.