Linguistic Supertypes: A Cognitive-Semiotic Theory of Human Communication (review)

This book introduces the term "linguistic supertypes," and the reader would like very much to see a careful discussion of this new concept from linguistic typology inside "a cognitive-semiotic theory of human communication." From the cognitive perspective, Durst-Anderson takes language to be a perceptual activity of the brain/mind, while from the semiotic perspective, the author studies the role of language in the processes of sign and communication. Thus, this book transitions between language, cognition, and semiotics as it introduces the concept of linguistic supertypes. For the sake of clarity, the reader will find at the end of the book a definition list of key concepts making up the theory of "linguistic supertypes" (295-305). The author claims that Linguistic Supertypes: A Cognitive-Semiotic Theory of Human Communication is addressed to "everyone interested in language, communication, semiotics and cognition" (xi). He even shows that "it is possible to read the chapters chronologically or separately, since none of the chapters require the reader to have read any of the preceding chapter(s), or for that matter, any of the succeeding ones" (xi). Now the collection of separate essays forms a whole book, but all his argument shows that it is not necessary to consider a coherent theory on linguistic supertypes without a clear notion of the keywords.

The notion of "linguistic supertype" is activated in three "modalities of existence": 1) the situation as such; 2) the experience of that situation; and 3) the memory of the experience of that situation (170). Supertypes come from reality-oriented, speaker-oriented, and hearer-oriented languages. This means that the language can speak with 1) the voice of reality involving situations; 2) the voice of the speaker involving his or her experiences; and 3) the voice of the hearer involving pieces of information presented to him or her (305). In addition, every supertype is "determined by aspect, mood, or tense" (178). Reality-oriented languages, such as Russian and Chinese, have a grammar that functions as a model of situations in reality and are dominated by aspect as a determinant category. Speaker-oriented languages such as Bulgarian, Turkish, and Georgian have a grammar that functions as a symptom of the speaker's experience of situations and are dominated by mood. And hearer-oriented languages, such as Danish and English, have a grammar that functions as a signal to the hearer to make sense out of meaninglessness, dominated by tense. Such a deterministic view of languages in isolation—reminiscent of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, unmentioned here—makes language speak with its own voice in time and place.

The language speaker has to make two choices: 1) What do I want to say? and 2) How should I put it? While the former is a more or less free choice, the latter is "a choice of type of grammar, or...a choice of linguistic supertype" (155). Not surprisingly, even in chapter four, entitled "Grammar and Pragmatics," instead of focusing on how context contributes to meaning, pragmatics is taken to be "more structure-driven than rule- or principle-driven" (95). In the book, Durst-Andersen shows how the grammatical structure of language determines the way communication takes place, e.g., in situations of foreign language teaching (182-83) or translation (258-59). Language functions through deterministic choices, and communication is not a creative activity, but rather a mechanistic process of encoding/decoding (155).

This position does not do enough justice to the issue of meaning-generating in language, as the reader might expect. Human communication is not only typological, but has a topological function. To look at language in a creative light would require going beyond cognitive linguistics and semiotics, drawing from the area of communication studies in general, and communication theory in particular. Incidentally, even in the areas of cognitive linguistics and semiotics, one can find many ideas related to the study of communication. Meanwhile, while drawing mostly on the work of Bühler, Bakhtin, and Peirce, Durst...