Cognitive linguistics in the redwoods: The expansion of a new paradigm in linguistics Ed. by Eugene H. Casad (review)

372LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) REFERENCES Cohen, Murray. 1977. Sensible words: Linguistic practice in England, 1640-1785. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fish, Stanley. 1972. Self-consuming artifacts: The experience of seventeenth-century literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The order of things: An archaeology of human sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. The American Scholar 49.165-79. Knowlson, James. 1975. Universal language schemes in England and France 1600-1800. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits: A selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton. Rorty, Richard. 1979. The linguistic turn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Salmon, Vivian. 1972. The works of Francis Lodwick: A study of his writing in the intellectual context of the seventeenth century. London: Longman. Slaughter, Mary M. 1982. Universal language and scientific taxonomy in the seventeenm century. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press. Subbiondo, Joseph L. 1977. John Wilkins' theory of meaning and the development of a semantic model. Cashiers Linguistiques d'Ottawa 5.41-61. -----. 1992. From Babel to Eden: Comenius and the 17th-century British philosophical language movement. Historiographia Lingüistica 19.261-73. Department of English Saint Mary's College of California Moraga, CA 94575 [Jsubbion@stmarys-ca.edu] Cognitive linguistics in the redwoods: The expansion ofa new paradigm in linguistics. Ed. by Eugene H. Casad. (Cognitive research, 6.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. vii, 1011. Reviewed by Margaret E. Winters, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale This is a collection of papers from the Second International Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference which took place at the University of California at Santa Cruz, July 29-August 2, 1991. These selected oral presentations were peer-reviewed and revised. No plenary papers were included in the volume, which nonetheless numbers over one thousand pages. Given that length, and thisjournal's policy oflimiting reviews to approximately 1200 words, it is obviously impossible to provide a critique—at any depth of analysis—of the contents of the book. Thus, Part 1 of this review will describe the conference at which the papers were first presented and the theoretical background of the gathering; Part 2 will outline the contents of the book itself; Part 3 will discuss the development of cognitive grammar as a well-defined body of linguistic theory and research as referred to in the subtitle of this volume and illustrated by the papers it contains. If the birth of any theory can be assigned a precise year, cognitive grammar can be said to have been launched with the publication of George Lakoffs Women, fire and dangerous things, and Ronald Langacker's Foundations ofcognitive grammar, I, both in 1987. Basic to the theory then—and now—is the claim that linguistic functioning (production and processing) can be linked directly to other human cognitive activity; this is a nonmodular approach to language. It is also highly functional (as opposed to formal), claiming as well that syntax is for the most part directly symbolic of meaning and that meaning itself ranges over what other theories divide between semantics and pragmatics. In 1989, the first International Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference was held in Duisburg (Germany) as one of the series of linguistic symposia which regularly take place there under the direction of Professor René Dirven. It was a rather small gathering of perhaps 75 REVIEWS373 participants, as contrasted with the 1991 Santa Cruz conference with close to 200. The latter conference, at least from the point of view of this attendee, was marked not only by a remarkably wide range of paper topics given the relative newness of the paradigm but also by particularly animated discussion accompanying the plenary and regular sessions. Further conferences took place in Leuven, Belgium (1993) and Albuquerque (1995); the most recent one was in Amsterdam in the summer of 1997. Even in 1991 at the second of these conferences, the range of topics covered was wide. In the 'Introduction' (1-24), C provides an overview to the volume without, unfortunately, placing cognitive grammar in any perspective among other current theories of linguistics, functional and formal. American linguistics' interest in metatheory—and particularly the interrelationship of functional theories...