Toward a Cognitive Semantics (review)

In the two volumes of this widely-anticipated work, Leonard Talmy systematically arrays and expands the studies that have won him immense influence as one of the most original theorists of language. Here are refined versions of classic articles such as ‘The relation of grammar to cognition’, ‘Fictive motion’, ‘How language structures space’, ‘The windowing of attention in language’, ‘Figure and ground’, ‘Force dynamics in language and cognition’, ‘The semantics of causation’, ‘Lexicalization patterns’, ‘The cognitive culture system’, and ‘A cognitive framework for narrative structure’.

‘Semantics’, T observes, ‘is intrinsically cognitive’ (1, 18). Grammars reveal conceptual structures, expressions prompt for conceptual arrays, and linguistics is a method for discovering the way we think.

T takes the view, familiar from various traditions of philology and linguistics, that language conforms to a fundamental design feature: It is divided into two subsystems, the grammatical and the lexical. The lexical subsystem consists of the ‘open’ classes of linguistic forms, including ideophonic, adjectival, verbal, and nominal roots. In contrast, the grammatical subsystem consists of all other forms, that is, ‘closed’ classes and accordingly includes grammatical categories and subcategories, grammatical relations, word order patterns, and grammatical complexes such as constructions, syntactic structures, and complement structures. Sentences prompt listeners to construct cognitive representations. The lexical subsystem, for the most part, provides cues for their content while the grammatical subsystem, for the most part, provides cues for their structure. Our capacity for language depends on our ability to integrate disparate conceptual contents and conceptual structures to create unified cognitive representations and equally on our ability to use a relatively limited inventory of grammatical and lexical forms to prompt for virtually unlimited ranges of cognitive representations.

Crucially, an elaborate semantics of grammar, a closed-class semantics, is informed by a system of constraints having to do with topology, perspective, attention, viewpoint, figure and ground, time and space, location and motion, and force and causation. T analyzes the semantics of grammatical and lexical subsystems and the ways in which they interact. The grammatical subsystem, for example, provides topological rather than Euclidean cues: English deictics this and that, the English preposition across, and the English past tense inflection -ed are all closed class items that are neutral with respect to magnitude of space or time, allowing us to say with equal felicity, This ant crawled across my palm or This bus drove across the country. These grammatical forms prompt for topological structure, for mental ‘rubber-sheet geometry’ that can be stretched indefinitely without challenging semantic constraints.

Resolving neutralities in any given cognitive representation is principally the responsibility of the lexical subsystem. T similarly analyzes other kinds of closed-class neutrality having to do with shape, closure, discontinuity, bulk, token, and substance.

Grammatical forms point to various conceptual categories which T calls ‘schematic categories’. These schematic categories further organize into extensive and complicated systems for structuring concepts which he calls ‘schematic systems’. The schematic systems concern configurational structure, perspective, the distribution of attention, force dynamics and causation, and cognitive state. T explains various organizing principles that cut across these schematic systems and that help to coordinate the grammatical and lexical subsystems.

There are many original, fundamental, and extended theoretical proposals in these volumes. T is widely known, for example, for his work on the closed-class element he calls ‘satellite’ which combines with verb to create the constituent ‘verb complex’, as in English misfire, where the satellite is mis-, and start over, where the satellite is over. He analyzes the notions associated with satellites (satellites in English are mostly involved in the expression of ‘path’) and surveys the differences between languages that characteristically map the core schema into the verb (‘verb-framed languages’) and those that characteristically map it onto the satellite (‘satellite framed languages’).

An impression of T’s original cast of mind and method is available from even a brief glance at his account of ‘fictive motion’, that is, ‘the extensive representation of...