16.872, Review: Ling Theories/Cognitive Ling: Radden & Panther

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Subject: 16.872, Review: Ling Theories/Cognitive Ling: Radden & Panther

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1)
Date: 18-Mar-2005
From: Cristiano Broccias < cribroc at tin.it >
Subject: Studies in Linguistic Motivation 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:38:03
From: Cristiano Broccias < cribroc at tin.it >
Subject: Studies in Linguistic Motivation 
 

EDITORS: Radden, Günter; Panther, Klaus-Uwe
TITLE: Studies in Linguistic Motivation
SERIES: Cognitive Linguistics Research 28
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3347.html


Cristiano Broccias, Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Genoa 
(Italy)


OVERVIEW AND COMMENTARY

This volume comprises twelve papers, divided into four sections, which 
discuss the role of motivation in language. They are preceded by an 
introduction, "Reflections on motivation",, where Radden and Panther 
review the notion of motivation (and its relation to its opposite, i.e. 
arbitrariness). They also highlight its non-deterministic and 
multifactorial nature. They regard a linguistic unit (or target) as 
being "motivated if some of its properties are shaped by a linguistic 
source (form and/or content) and language-independent factors" (p.4). They 
then discuss the basic semiotic relations underlying motivation as well as 
various types of language-independent motivation (e.g. ecological 
motivation, genetic motivation, experiential motivation, perceptual 
motivation and cognitive motivation). It may be important to stress that 
by "language-independent motivation" Radden and Panther mean motivation 
which is not exclusive to the realm of language.

The papers are grouped into five sections, corresponding to different 
types of motivation. However, the editors stress that their classification 
is to some extent "arbitrary" (a pun I found very amusing). In what 
follows I will offer a short summary for each of the contributions as well 
as my own reactions. I would like to point out from the very start that 
the book is very interesting and deserves to be used as a reference point 
for future research on motivation. That is, my evaluation of the volume is 
positive overall. The fact that in the paper-by-paper analysis below I 
will insist, especially in some cases, on possible problems with the 
analyses put forward in the volume simply stems from my desire to see some 
important issues clarified in future research. 

Section I: Ecological motivation

John Taylor, "The ecology of constructions", regards constructions as the 
basic units of (Cognitive) Grammar and views them as being arranged in 
networks. The latter point is crucial for his definition of motivation. He 
claims that "[a] linguistic structure is motivated to the extent that it 
is related to other structures in the language" (p.57). The reader should 
therefore acknowledge that Taylor is using a more restricted definition of 
motivation than Radden and Panther's in that he emphasises the interdependence 
of phonological, semantic and symbolic structures (i.e. ecological motivation, 
which counts as an instance of language-independent motivation in Radden and 
Panther's analysis since networks are not restricted to language). He 
illustrates (his notion of) motivation by way of the noun "hamburger" (which 
originated as "hamburg" + "er" and was later reanalysed as "ham" + "burger") 
and the "Bang goes" constructions (e.g. "Bang goes my weekend!"). 

Taylor's paper is not only written very clearly but also contributes 
significantly to the development of the cognitive linguistic enterprise, 
in particular of Cognitive Grammar. First, in his preliminary remarks, he 
emphasises that both phonology and semantics have a certain degree of 
autonomy, a position which is rarely encountered in cognitive linguistic 
analyses. Second, he stresses the importance of constructions and of 
distributional facts, thus bridging the (potential) gap between 
Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, which aims to define grammatical notions 
semantically rather than distributionally, and Croft's Radical 
Construction Grammar, which, on the other hand, recognises the primacy of 
constructions (on this point see Broccias and Hollmann in preparation). 
Third, by highlighting the systemic nature of grammar, he implicitly sets 
the agenda for future cognitive linguistic research, which should not 
ignore that language is a "système où tout se tient". In fact, the volume 
would have profited even more in terms of its value if ecological 
motivation had been referred to throughout the volume. 

Ad Foolen, "Expressive binomial NPs in Germanic and Romance languages", 
investigates NPs like "a bear of a man" and "a hell of a job", i.e. 
complex NPs made up of two nouns (i.e. binomials) which convey a strong 
expressive force. He claims that both NPs in the binomial are heads. The 
first NP is the "expressive" head and the second the "referential" head. 
He also suggests that the construction is both iconically and ecologically 
motivated. It is iconically motivated because the first position of the 
attributive (i.e. expressive here) NP (e.g. "bear", "hell") mirrors its 
salience in the overall construction (i.e. the construction has a strong 
expressive form). The construction is also ecologically motivated because 
it can be related to the possessive NP-of-NP construction and the 
attributive A-N construction. 

I found Foolen's analysis very interesting because the pattern he 
discusses is undoubtedly challenging in terms of its symbolic structure. 
Also commendable is his insistence on the impossibility of identifying a 
unique head unambiguously, which is much in the spirit of cognitive 
linguistics. In a similar vein, he stresses that more than one factor may 
be involved in the motivation behind this patter, i.e. iconic motivation 
and systemic motivation. I must admit however that I didn't entirely 
understand his discussion of ecological motivation. That is, if we go back 
to Taylor's paper, for example, one can easily see why a certain form 
arose. "Hamburger" underwent morphological reanalysis because first of all 
its stress pattern, primary stress on "ham" and secondary stress 
on "burg", was the same as that of compounds like "cat-lover". In the case 
of the "Bang goes" construction, the order of the elements, for example, 
is the same as that found in presentational sentences, with which 
the "Bang goes" construction shares (some of) its special properties. By 
contrast, it is not clear to me why binomials, although obviously 
(synchronically) related to the possessive NP-of-NP construction (because 
the form is the same) and the attributive A-N construction (because they 
are functional similar in specifying an attribute of an entity), are 
motivated by them. That is, the author does not clarify in my opinion what 
conditions led to the adoption of the NP-of-NP pattern in the first place. 
One can agree that the use of this pattern may correlate with 
highlighting "a conceptual distance [...] between the objective individual 
and the subjective [...] value judgement" (an idea which the author 
borrows from Campe 1997: 172), but the question remains as to what 
evolutionary path actually led from the (possessive) NP-of-NP construction 
to the expressive binomial. Why did speakers select the NP-of-NP form to 
code the expressive meaning (or the genitive pattern in Latin or the 
pattern with a motion preposition in Old High German for that matter) if 
no "of"-relation apparently holds between the two NPs? This question 
remains an interesting topic for future research.

Section II: Genetic motivation

Bernd Heine, "On genetic motivation in grammar", offers a short summary of 
his typological studies in grammaticalisation. In particular he discusses 
the cognitive forces underlying the emergence of the grammatical 
categories of numerals, indefinite articles and possession. Numerals 
evolved from our experience with body parts, indefinite articles typically 
from the numeral "one" and possession can be related to various source 
schemas. 

The importance of this paper lies in Heine's contention that a claim 
like "I cannot see any motivation, hence, there is no motivation" (see 
p.118) should be rejected if serious research is carried out. In fact, he 
underlines that his previous work in various areas has succeeded precisely 
in showing that motivation can be found. It should be noted however that 
Heine's article is a summary of previous research (he also prefers to 
refer the reader to his other publications for specific examples, see 
p.107). This may probably be due to the editors' desire to primarily offer 
a book which can be used as an introduction to the issue of motivation 
within the cognitive linguistic paradigm.

Christian Koops, "Emergent aspect constructions in Present-Day English", 
analyses three types of construction in Present-Day English which can be 
associated with progressive meaning in other languages, i.e. locative 
constructions (e.g. "I was in the middle of getting my hair cut"), posture 
verb constructions (e.g. "How could you stand there and watch them beat 
that guy?") and motion verb constructions (e.g. "You can't go around 
testing everybody for everything"). The English constructions all evoke 
imperfectivity (they are progressive, durative and repetitive 
respectively). They are genetically motivated in that their meaning is 
shown to follow from the lexical meanings of their source notions.

I think Koops' paper is one of the best in this collection because of his 
detailed examination of various constructions and the emphasis on their 
relatedness (through the notion of imperfectivity). I have only two minor 
observations to make about it. Still, my first point may be of some 
importance if the book is used as an introduction for non-expert readers.

Koops claims that progressive constructions "are typically restricted to 
dynamic events and incompatible with states" (pp.123-4). Although Koops' 
statement is hedged by "typically" (see also p.134 where he recognises 
that stative "sit" and "stand" are compatible with the progressive), his 
claim may be symptomatic of the fact that "[i]t is sometimes supposed that 
the progressive aspect occurs only with dynamic verbs describing 
activities or events. However, the progressive can also be used with verbs 
that describe a static situation. In this case, the progressive expresses 
the meaning of a temporary state that exists for a period of time [...] 
Some of the most common verbs occurring with progressive aspect are of 
this type [i.e. stative, CB]" (Biber et al. 1999: 471). That is, the 
progressive in English seems to be able to evoke both "temporal expansion" 
(i.e. imperfectivity) and "temporal transience" although either aspect may 
be highlighted through the choice of a particular verb phrase. Indeed, 
there may be no reason to view the use of progressive aspect with stative 
verbs as exceptional (see Williams 2002; on the dangers of a unitary view 
of progressive aspect and the usefulness of its characterisation in terms 
of both expansion and transience for other grammatical phenomena see also 
Broccias 2005).

The second observation is: is the author sure that the constructions he 
deals with are emergent constructions in Present-Day English? What about 
past stages of the language? Of course, I fully understand that the author 
couldn't deal with this in a (necessarily) short paper. It will be 
interesting to see what diachronic data can tell us about these 
constructions.  

Section III: Experiential motivation

Vyvyan Evans and Andrea Tyler, "Spatial experience, lexical structure and 
motivation: The case of "in"") argue that the various senses of "in" can 
be accounted for in a principled way by regarding them as extensions from 
a "proto-scene", which describes "containment". Such extensions are 
motivated by our experience with different aspects of containment. They 
distinguish fifteen senses, which they arrange in a radial network.

The important point made by Evans And Tyler is that sense extension can be 
shown to have an experiential basis. Although I fully recognise the 
importance of this claim, I have three main reservations concerning Evans 
and Tyler's paper. 

The first reservation is psychological. The authors are fully aware 
that "not all senses associated with a particular phonological form may be 
recognised by a language user as being synchronically related" (note 4 on 
p.165; an almost identical note expressing the same warning is found in 
their 2001 paper (note 21, p. 744)). This immediately raises the question 
of what their network in Figure 3 is intended to represent, i.e. what is 
its psychological status? This question also bears on the nature of the 
proto-scene. The proto-scene is defined as a "highly abstract 
representation" (p.166). But then one must first show that such highly 
abstract representations do have a significant impact on how we manipulate 
language or, to put it differently, that they have a significant degree of 
activation in the conceptualiser's mind. In fact, research such as Boas's 
(2003) (although carried out in the area of resultative constructions) 
seems to suggest that extensions originate from very concrete uses rather 
than highly abstract representations. It may also be relevant to remember 
that Langacker has repeatedly expressed reservations about the degree of 
activation of high-level schemas in the conceptualiser's mind (see e.g. 
Langacker 1999: 118). 

The question concerning the psychological status of the proposed network 
leads me to the second reservation, which is empirical. I think that the 
authors' framework and analyses would profit greatly not only from 
psychological experiments (the relevance and importance of which is 
admittedly duly remarked upon in the note mentioned above) but also from 
corpus evidence (both synchronic, see below on the "rub in" example, and 
diachronic, see below on the Means Meaning). Although their line of 
reasoning (in motivating sense extensions) sounds in general convincing 
(but see also below), empirical evidence, if available, is a sine qua non 
for safer analyses (in fact the authors themselves point this out in their 
2003 volume, see e.g. p.236). Contrary to what the authors seem to claim 
in note 4 in this paper and in note 21 of their 2001 paper, (at least 
some) corpus evidence can already be made available. Gries (2004), for 
example, has shown that cognitive linguistics can benefit from corpus 
linguistic analyses of word senses in that semantic networks can be 
investigated by using corpus evidence. Further, the proposed paths of 
extension deserve to be checked against both diachronic evidence and cross-
linguistic evidence. Of course, I am not suggesting that the authors 
should have done this in their paper, given obvious space limitations. 
Rather, I am simply suggesting that some references to this, at least as a 
topic for future research, could have been made.

Further, some analyses may be objected to. For example, the authors claim 
that the Means Sense of "in", as in "She wrote in ink" and "He spoke in 
Italian", is motivated on the basis of "the tight correlation in 
experience between an activity and the means of accomplishing the 
activity" (p.178). In more detail, they say that "[t]his has been possible 
precisely because "in" had an antecedent Activity Sense associated with it 
[i.e. the one exhibited in sentences like "He's in the governor's office", 
meaning "He works for the governor", CB]" (p.178). One may want not agree 
with this analysis or at least object to the examples meant to illustrate 
it. The first problem has to do with the causal relation envisaged by the 
authors between the Activity Sense and the Means Sense (see the use 
of "because" in the sentence above but note, however, that such a causal 
link is not captured in Figure 3 on page 173). Italian, for example, lacks 
the Activity Sense, as this sense is illustrated through the authors' 
examples, for the preposition "in" (the form of the preposition is the 
same as in English) but still has at least some Means Sense uses. 
English "in" in "She wrote in ink" is rendered with the Italian 
preposition "con" (English "with"). "In" in "He spoke in Italian" is, on 
the other hand, also rendered with the preposition "in" in Italian 
(i.e. "Parlò in italiano"). Of course, one could object that the 
prepositional system is not the same in the two languages and hence the 
paths of extension for Italian "in" and English "in" differ. If, however, 
Evans and Tyler's explanation for the use of "in" in "He spoke in Italian" 
is language independent, then the Italian rendering may cast doubt on 
their analysis. 

In either case, this simple example shows that a purely speculative 
analysis is not sufficient. What's more, one may also wonder whether the 
sentence "He spoke in Italian" actually involves a Means Sense. Why can't 
this use of "in" be based on an alternative explanation (or a combination 
of more than one kind of motivation)? For instance, one might view "to 
speak in language X" as "to use words that are found in language X", 
i.e. "in" has the (prototypical) container function in that we view words 
as objects in a language/container. From a historical point of view, I 
would also like to observe that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does 
not seem to mention the Activity Sense meaning, at least as Evans and 
Tyler seem to intend it on the basis of the examples they provide (see 
also below). By contrast, the sentences used by the authors to illustrate 
the Means Sense (i.e. (17a), "She wrote in ink", and (17b), "He spoke in 
Italian") are apparently related to two types in the OED (see OED senses 
13 and/or 14 for the former (and observe that sense 14 is attested for the 
first time in1663) and 12c for the latter). Note also that examples like 
(17b), "He spoke in Italian", date back to at least c900 according to the 
OED. So it may seem strange that the Activity Sense from which Evans and 
Tyler claim the Means Sense is derived is not recognised in the OED. In 
fact, on the basis of the OED data (i.e. OED sense 7), it may be the case 
that Evans and Tyler's examples like "She's in medicine" are later 
(metonymic) developments from "membership" examples like "to be in a 
company/college/association/party, to be in the army/navy", which indeed 
are contemporaneous with the Means Sense (the first example involves Old 
English "here", i.e. "army").   

One more example whose analysis I find debatable is (25b), "Angela rubbed 
in the lotion". The authors claim that in this example "the lotion is not 
entering the skin, only to be free to leave again. The skin is not being 
conceived as an entity with interior space. Rather, [... "in" can be used 
in this example because] "in" derives a Disappearance Sense which can come 
to be used in contexts unrelated to the original context which motivated 
this sense in the first place" (p.184). I doubt that the skin cannot be 
conceptualised as being three-dimensional (cf. "Ultracare 3 is quickly 
absorbed into the skin and forms a protective grease-free barrier" from 
the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, CD-version; this example 
seems to show that lotions are conceptualised as both moving into a three-
dimensional location and creating a surface layer). Further, the Oxford 
Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs glosses "rub in(/into)" as "force (something) 
into (a material) by rubbing it over the surface of the material" and 
gives as possible objects "oil", "polish", "cream", "ointment", "linament". 
This clearly shows that the Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs conceptualises 
"rub in" as involving motion into a three-dimensional location.

I'd like to conclude this rather lengthy discussion of Evans and Tyler's 
paper with one more (ecological) observation, which is linked to my second 
reservation (being empirical in nature) and which I hope the authors will 
take into due consideration in their future research. It may be the case 
that certain uses of "in" evolved because a "niche" (to use Taylor's word) 
was available for them. This is the case with the many instances in 
which "in" is used as either an intransitive preposition or in compounds 
(see Evans and Tyler's examples (20)-(25) and (31)). The fact that 
e.g. "Angela rubbed in the lotion" is possible in English but does not 
have a word-by-word translation into Italian can be related to the fact 
that "change constructions" (i.e. what are usually called resultative 
sentences, see Broccias 2003) are very much restricted in Italian (as well 
as in other Romance languages). Further, it should also be stressed that 
any account which purports to trace the paths of extension of the 
preposition "in" should take into account certain very important 
historical facts of an ecological nature. In particular, it is worth 
remembering that the preposition "in" was seldom used in Old English 
(which preferred "on"). That is, the evolution of "in" should not perhaps 
be studied independently of the preposition "on" which it came to replace 
in many cases. This point, and the preceding discussion, show that cross-
linguistic data, synchronic data and diachronic data are all essential 
ingredients to investigate meaning extension even within an experientially 
based account and that their use should not be delayed.

John Newman, "Motivating the uses of basic verbs: Linguistic and 
extralinguistic considerations", shows how basic verbs 
(e.g. "eat", "give", the state verbs "stand", "sit", "lie") motivate 
various grammatical facts (serialization, tense and aspect markers, noun 
classifiers, case marking) in various languages. 

His paper is very important because it does not only report on past 
research but also advances new suggestions as to how posture verbs may 
interact with agent-patient distinctions in various languages. Further, it 
fits well into the volume because Newman takes a very balanced view of 
motivation: he explicitly combines experiential motivation with ecological 
motivation (see for example p.194 and p.201). Only if ecological 
motivation enters the equation can we motivate the origin of grammatical 
structures satisfactorily. I also liked very much his being explicit about 
the implications concerning the interaction between experiential and 
ecological motivation. His final remark on this is worth quoting almost in 
toto: "taking certain structures as given [...] begs the question of how 
these linguistic structures came to be there in the first place. 
Ultimately, the linguistic structures assumed in the discussion here need 
to be accounted for and also motivated by other linguistic [i.e. 
ecological, CB] and extralinguistic considerations. In this way, one is 
led to a kind of infinite regression into the very foundations of 
language" (p.214).

Section IV: Cognitive motivation

Teenie Matlock, "The conceptual motivation of fictive motion", discusses 
fictive motion sentences (e.g. "A trail goes through the desert"), where a 
motion verb is used to describe a static scene. She illustrates the 
grammatical properties of the construction and argues that they are 
motivated by the fact that mentally simulated motion is part of fictive 
motion sentence processing.

Matlock's contribution mainly reports on her past and on-going research. 
Still, it is very welcome as an introduction to fictive motion sentences, 
especially because of its focus on processing. Matlock also points out 
that much research still needs to be done in the area of fictive motion 
constructions. In particular, I found interesting her suggestion (based on 
previous work by Langacker) that the acceptability of some sentences may 
depend on Langacker's sequential scanning. She claims that the contrast 
between "??The cell phone goes from the cup to the book." (where the phone 
is on the desk and we imagine that the cell phone is unusually long) 
and "The cell phone goes from the cup to the book" (phone in ad on 
billboard) may be due to absence vs. presence of sequential scanning 
involving the subject NP. She argues that a cell phone is not scanned 
sequentially (even if it is unusually long) because "a coherent whole can 
be obtained with just one glance" (p.228). Of course, this is just a 
suggestion and it is open to future research. But I would like to point 
out that the nature of scanning is a very thorny issue (see for example 
Broccias and Hollmann in preparation). Further, if I understand the 
intended difference between the two sentences correctly,  it might be that 
such a difference does not have to do with scanning per se but rather with 
the relative dimensions of the objects involved (i.e. perspective). That 
is, in the phone-on-desk case, the phone is still (much shorter) than the 
table and the table is thought of as being of ordinary dimensions. In the 
ad-on-billboard case, the phone (as well as the table) is much larger than 
usual (as compared for example with our body). Note that this explanation 
is not dissimilar from the one Matlock herself offers for another example, 
namely her (6b), "??The small, perfectly round hot tub goes along the back 
fence" (which is ok if an appropriate perspective is chosen, see p.228). 

To put it differently, the problem with the sentence discussed here is 
that there might be a clash between the verb, which prototypically evokes 
a non-negligible extension for the entity of which it is predicated, and 
the entity chosen as its subject. This is most visible in another pair of 
examples which Matlock explains on the basis of sequential scanning, 
namely "?The sidewalk runs from here to there." (five feet long) vs. "The 
sidewalk runs from here to there" (500 feet long). If we assume that the 
prototypical translational use of "run" requires a relatively long 
distance to be run, than the choice of a five-foot sidewalk as a subject 
clashes with this requirement (it sounds odd in normal circumstances to 
say that a person, for example, ran five feet). Further, note that the 
very choice of sidewalk to refer to something which is five feet long may 
be questionable anyway. Be that as it may, I think that Matlock's research 
is of crucial importance to the development of cognitive linguistic 
analyses and one cannot praise enough her experimental approach.

Anatol Stefanowitsch and Ada Rohde, "The goal bias in the encoding of 
motion events", investigate two hypotheses concerning the apparently less 
restricted distribution of goal-PPs as compared to other path-PPs, namely 
the (psychological) salience hypothesis and the complete-conceptualisation 
hypothesis. The former motivates the goal bias in terms of our greater 
interest in the goal of actions than in sources. The latter claims that 
goal PPs are less restricted because they are more informative. Using 
corpus evidence, the authors show that the picture is more complex than 
usually assumed. Although goal PPs seem to be preferred in general, the 
existence of "exceptions" is due to the nature of the verbs employed (e.g. 
the manner of motion verb stroll combines primarily with trajectory PPs). 
Stefanowitsch and Rohde also argue that the complete-conceptualisation 
hypothesis has more explanatory power than the salience hypothesis. They 
recognise however that the two may not be mutually exclusive.

This paper is also very good. It demonstrates the importance of corpus 
research for studies of motivation in a very clear manner. I have only a 
relatively minor observation concerning the authors' claim that "[i]t is 
simply not the case that every motion event is conceptualized as having a 
source, a trajectory, and a goal [...] There is nothing to stop us from 
construing a motion event as having only a source, only a trajectory, or 
only a goal. Verbs like "cruise", "stroll", and "escape" impose just this 
type of construal" (p.264). I fear that this statement may confound two 
issues. On the one hand, I agree that not every event has a source-
trajectory-goal structure. This is so because translational motion is not 
the only possible type of motion, of course (consider circular motion, for 
instance). For example, the author's sentence "They were cruising up and 
down Main Street" can be regarded as an instance of an oscillatory type of 
motion. On the other hand, I find doubtful the claim that certain 
translational events have, for example, only sources (by contrast, one 
could of course argue that sources are not conceptualised in circular 
motion). There is no clear sense in which one can use the notion "source" 
if a target is not activated at some level of saliency. The fact that the 
target cannot be pinned down exactly is another matter and in any case it 
remains to be shown that this means that the target is not conceptualised. 
At worst, the target is taken to be the complement of the original 
location. If I went out, the target is my not being in any longer. What 
seems to me (at least intuitively) to be conceptualised perhaps optionally 
is only the trajectory (if I say "I went out into the back garden", I 
agree that it may be difficult to identity the trajectory here. As soon as 
I have walked through the door, I'm in the garden. Still, it is 
interesting to observe that a trajectory preposition is used with 
reference to the door, i.e. "through". It is as if the conceptualisation 
of the trajectory were reduced to a minimum; hence, even in this case, it 
may be argued that some residual notion of trajectory is activated after 
all). 

In sum, the conceptualisation of events in terms of schemas other than the 
source-trajectory-goal schema is in principle independent of the authors' 
observation that sources, for example, are not conceptualised in some 
(translational) events. In translational motion cases, the claim that 
sources can be conceptualised without reference to targets is rather a 
strong one and should be investigated carefully. A source by definition 
implies an inner and an outer (or goal) space. Similarly, the notion of 
goal is complementary to that of source. In either case, the fact that the 
complement of what is expressed in the syntax is not profiled does not 
necessarily mean that the complement is not activated. 

Gerhard van Huyssteen, "Motivating the composition of Afrikaans 
reduplication: A cognitive grammar analysis") motivates the existence of 
Afrikaans grammatical and onomatopoeic reduplications (e.g. "plek-plek", 
lit. "place-place", i.e. "in some places", and "heop-hoep" to refer to the 
bird scientifically known as "upupa africana") through various metonymies 
including MORE OF FORM FOR MORE OF CONTENT and PRODUCT FOR PRODUCER. He 
also implements his analysis using the descriptive apparatus of Cognitive 
Grammar.

Huyssteen's paper is interesting even if, as a reader of a volume on 
motivation, I would perhaps have liked less technical discussion on how 
his analysis can be implemented within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. 
Still, it must be emphasised that the author does not only refer to 
metonymic motivation but also hints at ecological motivation as 
contributing to the existence of reduplicated forms. On page 289, the 
author cogently remarks that the use of reduplication is also found in 
other areas, e.g. to code aspect. Such a balanced view of motivation 
should be much appreciated, in my opinion.

Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Olga Isabel Díez 
Velasco, "Metonymic motivation in anaphoric reference", study how to 
account in a principled way for cases where an anaphoric pronoun is used 
to refer to a metonymic antecedent (e.g. "The ham sandwich is waiting for 
his check and he/*it is getting restless."). After reviewing their 
analysis of what a metonymy is - they recognise two types, source-in-
target metonymy (e.g. "He's a real brain") and target-in-source metonymy 
(e.g. "Chrysler has laid off a hundred workers") - they propose a general 
constraint on metonymic anaphora and three principles which are graded 
with respect to each other and interact in a way that captures the data 
considered.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Díez Velasco have written a very thought-
provoking paper, which will have to be taken into serious consideration in 
subsequent analyses within cognitive linguistics. Still, I must point out 
that I have various reservations about the nature and scope of their 
analysis, which I hope the authors will be able to clarify in future work.

First is the issue of empirical evidence. The authors base their analysis 
on very few invented examples. Although it may be very difficult to find 
natural examples of anaphoric reference to metonymic antecedents, the risk 
of arriving at empirically debatable conclusions is high. Even within 
their paper, apparently similar examples are judged differently. For 
instance, (12b) "*The ham sandwich is waiting for his check and it is 
getting restless" is starred but (16b) "?The mushroom omelet left without 
paying its bill. It jumped into a taxi" (from Stirling 1996) only receives 
a question mark. But both are explained on the basis of the same principle 
(the Domain Availability Principle or DAP, see p.307; but see also below 
on this contrast). Still, the authors set up a complex system of 
principles precisely to explain sentences which receive question marks vs. 
stars (e.g. (17a), "?The mushroom omelet left without paying. It was 
inedible" vs. (17b) "*The mushroom omelet left without paying. It was 
inedible"). That is, not only are the data not authentic but the 
acceptability judgements could also be objected to. It would perhaps have 
been useful to include examples rated by a sufficiently large number of 
native speakers.  

The second observation is: admitting that Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Díez 
Velasco's principles exist, what is their place in grammar (I 
use "grammar" in the sense of Langacker's, i.e. as a structured inventory 
of conventional linguistic units, see also the quotation from van Hoek 
1997 below), i.e. how are they represented in the conceptualiser's mind? 
Do they have an independent existence of the cognitive principles on which 
they are hypothesised to be based? Are they relevant to both production 
and understanding? Does their ordering differ from speaker to speaker? Of 
course, the authors could not possibly have answered all these questions 
in their paper but I believe that questions like these could have been 
mentioned at least in passing since they are not trivial at all.

The status of the proposed principles seems to me to be reminiscent of 
that of principles postulated in generative grammar (it is also 
interesting that the authors on p.313 do actually use some sort of 
generative jargon, either voluntarily or not: "Finally, the CMA is not 
strictly a principle but a filter for attempts to generate metonymies that 
would cancel out a metonymy which is already active in the antecedent.") 
Related to this is the fact that to postulate such a complex system in 
order to motivate very few examples may in itself be suspicious (see also 
the fifth point below). But why postulate very specific (i.e. metonymy-
specific) principles and not rely on more general cognitive notions? 

The third point concerns the grading of the principles with respect to 
each other. The authors' line of reasoning risks to be circular unless 
more examples are considered. For instance, on page 312 they write 
that "[w]hen the metonymy is in the antecedent as in (19), we have a 
situation in which the DAP needs to apply first". In other words, they 
seem to apply the postulated principles to their data in an order dictated 
by the relative strength of their principles but the relative strength of 
their principles is derived from the very data the principles purport to 
capture. Further, the question of how this grading is represented in our 
mind remains (see the previous point, especially in connection to possible 
variation among speakers).

The fourth observation has to do with whether these principles are 
universal or specific to English. Consider for example what happens in 
Italian with (16a) "The mushroom omelet left without paying its bill. He 
jumped into a taxi" and (16b) "?The mushroom omelet left without paying 
its bill. It jumped into a taxi". Italian usually omits subject pronouns 
so we can't use them to track reference. However, Italian (at least in its 
Northern varieties) does not use the past simple to refer to past events 
but a form corresponding to the English present perfect (i.e. 
Italian "passato prossimo"). Importantly, the auxiliary employed with 
verbs of motion is "essere" (i.e. English "to be") and the participial 
form behaves like an adjective in this case in the sense that it agrees in 
gender with the subject (both the French loanword "omelette" and its 
Italian equivalent "frittata" are feminine in Italian). Interestingly, the 
only translation I find acceptable is "La frittata ai funghi se n'è andata 
senza pagare e si è infilata in un taxi" (observe that I added the 
conjunction "e", "and", to render the whole expression more natural. An 
alternative could have been to use two separate clauses connected by the 
temporal conjunction "poi", "then". Without either "e" or "poi", I 
wouldn't accept the sentence). That is, the participial form "infilata" 
(colloquial for "to rush/jump") is feminine, not masculine. I find the 
masculine version, in which the participial agrees with the intended 
referent, not acceptable. In other words, the Italian pattern is the 
opposite of the English one. This (possibly) shows that if we accept Ruiz 
de Mendoza Ibáñez and Díez Velasco's principles either we would have to 
reorder them in other languages or have to think of them as interacting 
with other "constraints" so that the picture becomes even more complex. 
I'm not denying that some sort of interaction may actually take place; 
rather, I'm objecting to motivating the acceptability judgements reported 
in this paper in terms of very well-defined, i.e. specific, metonymic 
principles. 

My fifth concerns has to do with other possible ways of capturing the 
examples in (16)-(21) without invoking the authors' complex machinery, 
i.e. a set of specific principles. What I have in mind as a cognitive 
analysis of metonymic anaphora would be an investigation along the lines 
of Hoek's (1997) study of non-metonymic anaphora:

"In this view [i.e. using van Hoek's model of conceptual reference points, 
CB], the anaphora constraints are not distinct principles which must be 
independently listed in the grammar; rather they emerge from the nature of 
linguistic semantic organization in general and nominal semantics in 
particular. [...] The theoretical machinery underlying grammaticality 
judgments involves the interaction of schemas, that is, constructional 
templates, which are entrenched to varying degrees." (van Hoek 1997: 218)

Just for the sake of the argument, let's suppose that the judgements in 
(16)-(21) are indeed those of the majority of native speakers (but 
remember that there is a contrast in grammatical judgement between (16b), 
which has a question mark, and (12b), which has an asterisk). I will now 
sketch out an explanation for (16)-(17) which does not require the 
postulation of any specifically metonymic principles but rather relies on 
general cognitive principles. 

The fact that the example in (16a), "The mushroom omelet left without 
paying its bill. He jumped into a taxi", is better than (16b), "?The 
mushroom omelet left without paying its bill. It jumped into a taxi" may 
be simply due to the fact that "he" is an unmarked option for reference 
with respect to "it". In other words, one naturally expects the metonymic 
link to decay more quickly than its target (see also Panther and 
Thornburg's 2002 view of metonymy as being contingent). So we are simply 
using an unmarked anaphora in (16a), whereas (16b) requires us to keep the 
metonymic link active for longer (although the similarity of the two 
clauses, both referring to motion, may contribute to make the whole 
expression partly acceptable. This might also motivate why (12b), "*The 
ham sandwich is waiting for his check and it is getting restless", is 
worse, at least if we agree on this acceptability judgement. That is, in 
(12b) we don't have the same frame in both clauses: the first is about 
waiting, the second is about the psychological consequences of waiting). 
Admittedly, however, the Italian data would need a different explanation. 
My point here is simply to try to show that without postulating any 
principles like Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Díez Velasco's one can come up 
with a different analysis accounting for the same data.  

As to (17a), "?The mushroom omelet left without paying. It was inedible", 
vs. (17b), "*The mushroom omelet left without paying. He was inedible", we 
can motivate the deviance of the former by observing that the sentence 
evokes two different frames (as the authors themselves duly remark). The 
first clause obviously targets a person, not the food, so "it" in the 
second clause requires us to do more work than a sentence starting 
with "he", cf. (16a) (incidentally it might be interesting to study what 
happens if one continued with "He found it inedible" rather than "It was 
inedible"). (17b) is out simply because it is very difficult to see the 
reason why one would want here to predicate a property of an object 
through the person that has control over (i.e. eats) it. Whereas the first 
clause conveys some sort of expressive meaning and/or allows the act of 
reference to take place more quickly (cf. "the person who ate the mushroom 
omelet"), there is no obvious advantage either in terms of either 
expressiveness or economy or clarity in choosing "he" over "it" in the 
second clause. 

In sum, I hope to have shown that by relying on very general principles 
like, for example, "markedness", "economy" and "expressiveness" one could 
provide an alternative view of (at least some of) the facts discussed by 
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Díez Velasco. I suspect that that these general 
principles interact non-deterministically every time we are confronted 
with sentences such as those discussed by the authors and do not actually 
result in an ordered set of specific (i.e. metonymy-related) principles. 
But before doing that, it is necessary to (at least) (a) collect natural 
examples and ask a statistically significant number of native speakers to 
judge the sentences on which the authors' theory rests and (b) take into 
consideration what the functional (i.e. communicative) motivation is for 
using a marked option.

Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar, "Predicative adjectives and grammatical-
relational polysemy: The role of metonymic processes in motivating cross-
linguistic differences", consider various English constructions which take 
predicative adjectives (e.g. "London was foggy today", "I am hot", "I was 
firm of purpose", "One should be as clear as possible about historical 
facts", "The editor is certain to reject it") and observe that they do in 
general correspond to predicative adjective structures in Croatian, German 
and Hungarian. The authors claim that English, unlike the other three 
languages, relies heavily on metonymic processes in structuring its 
clauses (i.e. English exhibits more "grammatical polysemy" than the other 
three languages). 

Although the title makes reference to metonymic processes only, at the end 
of their paper Brdar-Szabó and Brdar relate the greater recourse to 
metonymic processes in English (as opposed to the other three languages 
considered) to the lack of a flexible word order in English (see pp.350-
351). The recognition of the importance of linguistic considerations (i.e. 
word order), alongside metonymic ones, is welcome because, by focussing on 
both aspects, the authors strengthen their analysis.

Anotonio Barcelona, "Metonymy behind grammar: The motivation of the 
seemingly "irregular" grammatical behavior of English paragon names") 
concludes the volume investigating the conceptual operations underlying 
the use of paragon names (e.g. "That young man is a real Shakespeare"). He 
claims that two metonyms are involved, namely CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY 
OF AN INDIVIDUAL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL and IDEAL MEMBER FOR THE CLASS.

The novelty in Barcelona's work resides in his use of two metonymies 
rather than one to elucidate the use of paragons and in his viewing the 
CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY OF AN INDIVIDUAL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL metonym as 
purely conceptual or prelinguistic (i.e. p.369). That is, we access our 
stereotypical model of Shakespeare (the target) through a source where a 
link between SHAKESPEARE and (HAVING) IMMENSE LITERARY TALENT is created. 
Crucially, however, this metonymy does not show up independently in the 
language. Barcelona is aware that his proposal may appear controversial 
and repeatedly insists on it (see for example page 367). Only future 
research, I think, will be able to tell us if his stimulating analysis is 
on the right track.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Since I have commented extensively on most of the papers in the previous 
section, I will now limit myself to some general remarks. All in all, the 
book under review is an important contribution to the study of motivation 
from a cognitive linguistic perspective. It is commendable both as an 
introduction to various types of motivation currently being investigated - 
Radden and Panther's introduction is also very clear and informative in 
this respect - and as a starting point for future developments.. As I have 
pointed out above, there are some excellent papers (e.g. Taylor, Koops, 
Newman, Matlock, Stefanowitsch and Rohde) and a great variety of 
challenging ideas have been put forward. Taylor's contribution in 
particular stands out because it points to a crucial requirement for 
future cognitive analyses. It is not enough to say that structure X in 
language Y is motivated, for example, experientially if we do not 
recognise first that a "niche" for structure X is available in language Y. 
This point is also mentioned explicitly by Newman, who is aware of its 
epistemological implications. I think that it is one of the greatest 
merits of this volume to have brought this point to the fore within 
cognitive linguistics. 
Finally, I hope that my observations, especially in the case of the papers 
by Evans and Tyler and by Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and Díez Velasco, may be 
of some value to clarify a few issues that not all cognitive linguistics-
oriented scholars may agree with. 
To be sure, this book paves the way to future cognitive analyses which 
will take into serious consideration various strands of motivation, from 
ecological motivation to cognitive motivation. 

REFERENCES

Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward 
Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: 
Longman.

Boas, Hans. 2003. A Constructional Approach to Resultatives. Stanford, CA: 
CSLI Publications.

Broccias, Cristiano. 2003. The English Change Network. Forcing Changes 
into Schemas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (Cognitive Linguistics Research 
22).

Broccias, Cristiano. 2005. The construal of simultaneity in English with 
special reference to as-clauses. Unpublished Manuscript, University of 
Genoa.

Broccias, Cristiano and Willem Hollmann. (in preparation). Do we need 
summary and sequential scanning in (Cognitive) grammar?

Bullon, Stephen et al. 2003. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 
(with CD-Rom). Harlow: Longman.

Burchfield, R.W. et al. 2002. Oxford English Dictionary (CD-version). 
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Campe, Petra. 1997. Genitives and "von"-datives in German: A case 
of "free" variation? In Verspoor, M. et al. (eds.). Lexical and 
Syntactical Constructions and the Construction of Meaning. Amsterdam: 
Benjamins. 165-185. 

Cowie, Anthony and Ronald Mackin. 1993. Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal 
Verbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gries, Stefan. 2004. Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The 
many senses of "to run". Unpublished Manuscript, University of Southern 
Denmark.

Langacker, Ronald. 1999. Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Mouton de 
Gruyter (Cognitive Linguistics Research 14).  

Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda Thornburg. 2002. The role of metaphor and 
metonymy in English "-er" nominals. In Dirven, René and Ralf Pörings 
(eds.). Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Berlin: Mouton 
de Gruyter (Cognitive Linguistics Research 20). 279-319.

Stirling, Lesley. 1996. Metonymy and anaphora. Belgian Journal of 
Linguistics 10: 69-88.

Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans. 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy 
networks: The case of "over". Language 77: 724-765.

Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans. 2003. The Semantics of English 
Prepositions. Spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

van Hoek, Karen. 1997. Anaphora and Conceptual Structure. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press.

Williams, Christopher. 2002. Non-Progressive and Progressive Aspect in 
English. Fasano: Schena editore. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Cristiano Broccias is a Research Fellow in English Language and 
Linguistics at the Faculty of Modern Languages of the University of Genoa 
(Italy). His main interests lie in the description and cognitive 
linguistic analysis of English grammar, both synchronic and diachronic. 
His publications include a monograph on English change constructions: "The 
English Change Network. Forcing Changes into Schemas", Mouton de Gruyter 
(Cognitive Linguistics Research 22), 2003.





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