"Language holds a special
place in human life. It provides the dominant medium for social interaction
helping to enable the distinctive forms of organization that we call cultures.
Likewise, it provides an important medium of psychological representation,
helping to constitute the distinctive forms of thought we call mind. As
language mediates both culture and mind, it necessarily draws all three into a
close-knit relationship. Though few doubt the importance of language, we still
debate just exactly how large a mediating role language plays and precisely
what ways" (p. 1) The opening paragraph of the lead paper by John Lucy
clearly sets the main theme and the purpose of this voluminous collection of
essays under the title Language, Culture and Mind.

In this book, Michel Achard and
Suzanne Kemmer present thirty-five original essays bringing together work at
the crossroads of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science and
related fields. This collection of seminal essays represents a wide spectrum of
perspectives, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. Some perspectives and
methodologies represented among the papers are corpus-based methodologies,
discourse analysis, language acquisition, contrastive analysis,
psycholinguistic experimentation, and language change and grammaticalization.
Some theoretical frameworks deployed in the various analyses are Cognitive
Grammar, Construction Grammar, Metaphor Theory, and Mental Space and Blending
Theory. What unites all of them and brings them together under the title Language,
Culture and Mind, is that each addresses in its own way the age-old problem
of the way that language relates to human culture and cognition with an emphasis
on how language is produced and understood in context.

The overarching theme of the volume
is that language is embedded in the social and cultural reality of language
users, and that such social and cultural knowledge is necessarily entwined with
the cognitive structures that form the matrix for linguistic knowledge. Topics
considered include human categorization, cognitive and cultural models,
embodiment, and the experiential basis of categories and conceptual structures,
lexical and constructional semantics, and the distribution and formal
properties of linguistic elements and constructions in wide variety of
languages.

Lucy in his paper directly
addresses the nature of the three-pronged relation of language, culture and
mind. He asks the question, to what extent does linguistic form matter for
thinking? According to Lucy’s results, derived from controlled experimentation,
speakers of languages of different structures, do, in fact, show differences in
the ways the conceptualize domains of knowledge associated with those
structures, as evidenced by systematic differences in non-linguistic behavior.

The rest of papers in the volume vary as to whether
they address the relation of language to thought and culture in the specific
instantiations of these concepts, or their general one. A fair number of papers
in the volume stress the embedding of language in its specific social and
cultural context. Bergen, for example, uses cultural models and blending to
analyze and explain political discourse, specifically the editorial cartoons
published in the week following 9/11. Chen shows the interplay of emotion and
cognition in the discourse of insults. Kelly and Halvarson’s paper, in which
they investigate the linguistic means by which an on-line community in computer-mediated
discourse can be established, highlights the social dimension. The relation of
discourse and grammar is brought to fore by Wouk as she explores what
conversational data can tell us about linguistic categories, specifically, the
clause and verb phrase in Indonesian. Bergen and Binsted study how particular
linguistic constructions can be used as a basis for reasoning involving
pragmatic scales, and how the creative use of such reasoning can be deployed
for humorous purposes.

A few of the papers in the volume
are explorations at a more metatheoretical level. For example Adamson explores
how some basic ideas in Cognitive Linguistics are received in contemporary
philosophy. Israel, Harding and Tobin compare simile with metaphor and show how
simile is distinct from metaphor in terms of both discourse functions and the
cognitive processes that it involves.

There are several more papers on
metaphor as it is a topic of intense interest among those who see a close
relation between language, thought and culture. Moder brings to bear
psycholinguistic experimentation to demonstrate how can have a profound
influence on the interpretation of metaphorical noun-noun combinations in
natural discourse, whether they are novel combinations or not. Stefanowitsch
uses linguistic corpora to study the mappings found in emotion metaphors in
English and German. Moore continues the metaphor theme but shifts the focus to
space, with his study distinguishing two kinds of cognitive frames of reference
found in space to time metaphorical mappings. Kabata and Lee observe how
certain special particles that appear to have similar semantics in Japanese and
Korean are actually subtly different, O’connor’s paper studies the category of
"associated motion" in Chontal, and shows how its event structure is
metaphorically mapped onto analogous temporal conceptual structures via a
grammaticalized construction having its own particular narrative functions and
semantic effects. Another paper focusing on motion event is Tanangkingsing’s
contribution.

Several of the papers in the volume
focus on corpus methodology. Nordquist compares the structures found in
elicited data and in linguistic corpora, arguing that differences found in two
kinds of data are the result of differences in the mode of processing of the
two kinds of language. Gries and Stefanowitsch elaborate their suite of
"collostructional" methods, analyzing the frequency interaction of
multiple elements in constructional slots.

There is also a sequence of papers
on the linguistic expression of causation. Song and Wolff, for example, use
psycholinguistic experiments to confirm the link between linguistic expressions
of causality and the perceptual properties of events, and thus provide evidence
for the distinction in conceptual structure between direct and indirect
causation. Degand’s paper investigates two causal connectives to show that they
differ significantly in the property of Speaker Involvement and other semantic
and discourse functions.

Huumo’s paper, in which he studies
fictive directionality in Finnish expressions of vision, and Johnson’s paper
about the verbs of visual perception and their complements in child language
are two essays on the linguistic expression of visual perception. There are
also a number of papers by McDaniels, Rice and Newman and Lubbers Quesada on
aspect.

Natural discourse is also the
object of study and data source in some of the papers. Vazquez Soto centers her
attention on the discourse categories of focus and topic in Cora, while
Dancygier uses conceptual blending and mental space theory to analyze how
different referring expressions in narrative can be deployed for particular
cognitive and discourse functions in constructing meaningful discourse.
Scheibman’s paper turns to conversational discourse to study the formal and
functional properties of the English pronoun we. The paper by Gabas Junior and
van der Auwera adds to the literature on ideophones with data from the
Amazonian language Karo. Another such recalcitrant type of linguistic
expression is the morpholexical blend, the topic of the contribution by Gries.
Papers by Jiang and Horie and Kondo offer conceptual analyses of Chinese and
Japanese, respectively.

One of a number of papers in the
volume linking a constructional approach with an empirical corpus-based
methodology is the contribution by Boas. Another corpus-based contribution to
English syntax is Heyvaert’s paper. Davidse, in his paper, continues in the
nominal realm with an account of English determiners. Ronald Langacker provides
a new and revealing account of the intricacies of finite clauses and their
complements.

Throughout the volume there are
many interlinking and recurring themes and subjects of interest. This volume
offers a rich panoply of ways of approaching the vast and deep set of questions
and issues that arise when we explore the relations between language, culture
and mind. I think this is a very useful collection of essays for the
researchers and academicians in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and
philosophy. I heartily recommend it as both a valuable tool for classroom use
to facilitate discussions for any classes in philosophy and psychology of
language, or in  linguistics and
cognitive science, and also for initiating further research in related fields.

© 2005 Kamuran Godelek

Kamuran
Godelek, Ph.D., Mersin University, Department of Philosophy, Mersin, TURKEY

Categories: Philosophical