Cultural, Psychological, and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics (review)

Within the past two decades, cognitive linguistics has established itself as one of the most popular research paradigms in many areas of linguistics. Cognitive linguists have always placed particular emphasis on the interdisciplinary nature of their approach, drawing on the work of psychologists, computer linguists, and philosophers in support of their hypotheses. Indeed, many central insights into the workings of language and cognition are the result of the cooperative efforts of cognitive linguists and scholars from adjacent fields. This interdisciplinary focus of cognitive linguistics is highlighted in the contributions to the present volume, seventeen selected papers from the biannual International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Albuquerque, NM, 1995).

Broadly, the volume falls into three parts, devoted to ‘Cultural patterns, language and cognition’ (Part 1), ‘Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches’ (Part 2), and ‘Typological issues’ (Part 3).

Part 1, focusing on how cultural patterns are reflected in language, contains four papers. Caitlin Hines’s contribution, a ‘case study in metaphorical lexicalization’, centers on semantic and phonological characteristics of the various figurative expressions that can be subsumed under the familiar woman as young animal metaphor (reflected in American English expressions such as kitten or filly). The author adduces ample evidence that these expressions typically have semantic and phonological features in common. Gary B. Palmer and Dorothea Neal Arin investigate ‘The domain of ancestral spirits in Bantu noun classification’, providing a new perspective on the semantics of Bantu classifiers inspired by the Lakoffian idea of radial categories. Masako Hiraga proposes a stimulating analysis of Japanese honorific verb constructions, focusing on what he considers their grounding in the difference is distance metaphor. Finally, Ning Yu re-examines a topic that has frequently been addressed in the pertinent literature, viz. the mind-as-body metaphor in language and cognition. More specifically, the author investigates the ‘Spatial conceptualization of time in Chinese’.

Of comparable interest are the nine papers comprising Part 2, which tackle a wide range of issues such as polysemy, prepositional semantics, and metaphor comprehension, to name but a few. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do justice to the contributions in this section which offer valuable insights into the respective topics from a psycholinguistic or neurolinguistic angle. One of the most rewarding studies, however, from an interdisciplinary perspective is the paper by Lawrence W. Barsalou, Karen Olseth Solomon, and Ling-Ling Wu (‘Perceptual simulation in conceptual tasks’) which presents evidence against the time-honored idea of a language of thought.

Part 3 encompasses four papers, devoted to various typological issues including grammaticalization, the typology of 1st person marking, grammatical relations, and classifier systems. Again, readers interested in these topics will not be disappointed.

In sum, the present volume can be strongly recommended for its perceptive discussions which more often than not constitute an important addition to the current literature in a field that will certainly continue to exercise a profound impact on contemporary linguistics.