Reviews

Abstract

, eds., Language and the cognitive construal of the world. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. 406pp.Reviewed by PATRICK J. DUFFLEY Language and the cognitive construal of the world is a collection of papers most of which result from a 1991 conference at Broederstroom, South Africa, on the theme "Language, Thought and Culture: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective". The papers are organized around the notion of the cognitive construal of the world, i.e. the relationship between the speaker (or hearer) and the situation which he conceptualizes and portrays. In cognitive grammar, the world is not seen as something objectively given, but rather as something construed by human cognition, and which therefore varies according to the specificity, degree of precision, background assumptions or perspective from which the speaker views it. While focussing on different aspects of the construal relation, all of the papers reject the objectivist, truth-functional approach to language in favour of an analysis which takes into account the mediating role of the speaker's cognitive processing.Eugene Casad, basing himself closely on Langacker's work, offers a detailed illustration of the notion of construal, showing how one and the same state of affairs may be construed very differently in several languages. Based on his examples, he criticizes Jackendoff (1983) for equating "semantic structures" with "conceptual structures": for Casad semantics is not universal, but is highly constrained by the cultures within which people exist and interact. This brings his views into relation with Kenneth Pike's tagmemics, which also takes a more holistic approach to the meaning of linguistic items.Langacker proposes an analysis of possessive constructions in English and certain other languages. He takes "possession" as a linguistic universal which has a universal image schema underlying it in which the possessor must be construable as a "reference point entity", by which he means that in order to conceptualize the possessed entity we must first conceptualize the possessor. This would explain why we find possessives expressing the relation of a whole to a part (the dog's tail) but not that of a part to a whole (?the tail's dog): since we do not ordinarily encounter detached tails, we think of a tail as a part of an animal and consequently conceptualize it via reference to the animal of which it is a REVIEWS 65