Language Diversity and Cognitive Representations (review)

As the editors say in the ‘Introduction’ (vii–x), the book’s aim is to provide a discussion of the issue of language diversity from the cognitive perspective, most of the previous studies being ethnolinguistic or sociolinguistic in nature. The volume’s asset is its truly interdisciplinary character, the contributing scholars being linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and neurophysicians. However, the French cognitive scene is dominant: eleven of fourteen contributors are affiliated with French institutions, the remaining three with those in the US and Germany.

Thirteen articles in the volume are grouped into three parts. In Part 1, devoted to cognitive aspects of semantic variations and invariance, Catherine Fuchs (3–19) presents an overview of the issue of language diversity in cognitive linguistics, Stéphane Robert (21–35) argues for a nonlinear and nonadditive nature of linguistic meaning and meaning construction, Antoine Culioli (37–51) links linguistic diversity with the cognitive activity of speaking subjects, and Christiane Marchello-Nizia (53–69) attributes diachronic changes in French presented in three case studies to the process of ‘objectification’.

Part 2 contains articles on conceptualization and cross-linguistic representations of space. Franç oise Ozanne-Riviere (73–84) provides data from Oceanic languages concluding that conceptualization of space depends on the culture and experience of speakers. Eve Danziger (85–106), in her study of the expression of spatial relationships in a Central American language, Mopan Maya, emphasizes the importance of sociolects and the speaker’s gender. Hansjakob Seiler (107–21), in turn, presenting data from Ancient Greek and a few other languages, identifies the relation of ‘solidarity’ between the domains of localization and predication. Finally, Christian Cuxac (123–42) offers a discussion of iconicity in spatial and semantic relations in French Sign Language.

Contributions to the volume, however, extend beyond the realm of the language-cognition interface. Part 3 starts with France Cloarec-Heiss’s (145–57) search for clues to the human cognitive system in the process of decoding drum messages of Banda- Linda, an African tone language. Next, Marta Kutas and Mireille Besson (159–78) propose an antimodular view of human cognition, having conducted several experiments on the electrical activity of the brain in processing music and language. Further, Michèle Kail (179–94) identifies several aspects of context important in off-line and on-line principles of sentence processing. The last two articles in the volume deal with language impairments. Jean-Luc Nespoulous (195–207) compares agrammatic utterances in different languages, making an attempt to distinguish between brain- and language-dependent phenomena. Finally, Bernard Pachoud (209–19) sees schizophasic utterances as manifestations of disturbances at the cognitive rather than language- specific level.

In sum, the book will be of interest to those concerned with the relationship between human cognition and natural language as well as with manifestations of the former in various languages, language disorders, and other spheres involving cognitive processing, such as music.