Cognitive Foundations of Grammar (review)

As Heine indicates in the preface, this monograph grows out of two courses on the cognitive foundations of grammar that he taught at the Australian Linguistic Institute in 1994 and at the Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in 1995, respectively. Having been one of his students in 1994, I am delighted to read this book.

The book contains eight chapters. Ch. 1 (3–17) lays out the framework. In the next five chapters, H talks about numerals (Ch. 2, 18–34), spatial orientation (Ch. 3, 35–65), indefinite articles (Ch. 4, 66–82), possession (Ch. 5, 83–108), and comparison (Ch. 6, 109–30). The main theme in these chapters is grammaticalization—how languages may be influenced by the cognitive force of human conceptualization in response to communicative needs. H shifts the focus of investigation from grammar to lexicon in Ch. 7 (131–46), where he shows that the unidirectional change of domain can also occur within the lexicon. H concludes in Ch. 8 (147–54) with a discussion of language as the product of interaction between humans and the world.

H’s approach to the cognitive foundations of language is typological and diachronic. His familiarity with a number of African and European languages (plus consultation of works on other languages) allows him to provide an accurate account of the issues discussed throughout the book. (My checking of the accuracy was largely performed with some languages of the Sino-Tibetan family.) This stands in sharp contrast to my previous experience of reading some other typological works in which observations either fail to apply to similar cases in Sino-Tibetan languages or deliberately exclude languages of this type from the outset.

When looking at a snapshot of a linguistic problem, we are often amazed by its complexity. However, we must bear in mind that linguistic problems in natural languages have a history of development; they are not synthesized instantly for clever solutions. Therefore the diachronic aspect of a linguistic phenomenon, more often than not, sheds important light on the puzzle. This point is best demonstrated in the case of possession, as discussed in Ch. 5.

A minor problem in H’s observations is the probabilistic predictions of comparative constructions (128–29), based on Stassen’s Comparison and universal grammar (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). As H himself notes (120), many of the particle constructions discussed by linguists such as Stassen may appear to have an etymologically obscure marker of standard, but actually the conceptual source of the marker is not opaque. For example, English than can be traced back to the sequence schema, and Latin quam to the similarity schema. Although removing these instances may not change the overall picture of the distribution of comparative constructions, ill-qualified cases have helped to yield an even stronger impression of European languages’ predominant use of particles in this regard.

While there are still many linguistic phenomena awaiting our understanding, H’s book will undoubtedly benefit prospective readers by providing a window to fascinating facts about the cognitive foundations of grammar.