Cognitive Linguistics (review)

Cognitive linguistics is the joint product of largely independent research programs begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s by scholars who shared the general goal of making grammatical and semantic theory responsible to the facts of usage and the flexibility of the human conceptual capacity. But what kind of product is it? To those outside the immediate spheres of influence of its major proponents (George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, Gilles Fauconnier, Leonard Talmy, among others), it might appear to be nothing more than an inventory of disparate constructs (prototype-based categories, semantic frames, mental spaces, metaphorical mappings) or even a set of case studies of linguistic idiosyncrasies. It doesn’t seem to DO anything, or at least it does not provide a uniform grammatical or semantic formalism. Instead, cognitive linguistics is a worldview, in which words, rather than denoting things in the world, are points of entry into conceptual networks (Langacker 1987, 1991), and syntactic patterns, rather than merely grouping symbols together, are cognitive and even motor routines of varying degrees of entrenchment and internal complexity (Bybee 2001). Since in this view both words and grammatical patterns have meanings, grammatical patterns may shift the designations of lexical items with which they combine, resulting, for example, in the augmentation of a verb’s array of arguments (Goldberg 1995, 2007). For example, in the attested sentence A gruff police monk barked them back to work, the nonce combination of a monovalent verb of sound production (bark) with the trivalent caused-motion construction forces a construal in which barking effects movement of the theme from one (metaphorical) location to another. This context-sensitive approach to linguistic meaning has been susceptible to the criticism that it is anti-rigor, particularly in its abandonment of constituent-structure-based semantic composition, because until now there has been no comprehensive and accessible introduction to the body of evidence on which it is based.

This situation has changed with the publication of Croft and Cruse’s excellent book, Cognitive linguistics, part of the ‘Cambridge textbooks in linguistics’ series. The central theme of this work, which is as likely to appeal to scholars of literature as it is to cognitive psychologists, is that ‘words do not have meanings, nor do sentences have meanings: meanings are something that we construe, using the properties of linguistic elements as partial clues, alongside nonlinguistic knowledge, information available from context, knowledge and conjectures regarding the state of mind of hearers and so on’ (98). Written in a lively way and transparently organized, this book will not only engage students of linguistics and language scholars outside of linguistics but also serve as a reference for working linguists. An outstanding achievement of this work is that it seamlessly integrates four streams of scholarship that, while traditionally subsumed under the rubric of cognitive linguistics, have not generally been combined: (i) models of word meaning based on image schemas, frame semantics, and metaphor; (ii) approaches to referential opacity, presupposition, and counterfactuality based on the mental-spaces framework; (iii) construction-based approaches to grammar; and (iv) usage-based approaches to the representation of grammar and morphology. One such combination is found in the treatment of metaphor in Ch. 8. Here, C&C describe a weakness of the influential Lakoff and Johnson (1980) theory of metaphor—that it does not capture the fact that the interpretation of many metaphorical expressions requires alterations to the metaphor’s source domain ontology. For example, in the sentence That surgeon is a butcher, we do not construe the surgeon as performing butchery on a human carcass intended for consumption, but rather as performing surgery on a living patient in a haphazard way. To account for such cases, C&C propose an enriched model of metaphorical mapping based on models of mental-space blending proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and Grady and colleagues (1999).

An additional achievement of the work is that it succeeds in highlighting connections between cognitive linguistics and models of categorization, sentence processing, and...