Reviewed by Ferit Kılıçkaya, Middle East Technical University
This book, comprised of articles mostly originating from the themed session ‘Motivation in language’ at the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Krakow, Poland, 2007, aims to explore motivation in grammar and the lexicon through cognition. The book is structured according to the linguistics components impacted by language-independent factors and divided into two parts: motivation in grammar and motivation in the lexicon.
The book opens with a very concise introduction to motivation written by the editors, providing an overall framework of the interaction between human systems and of the interaction between language and cognition, in addition to brief summaries of the chapters.
The first part of the book opens with a chapter that focuses on cognitive and communicative motivation, proposing a semantically motivated grammar to apply to English auxiliaries. The following chapter, ‘The mind as ground: A study of the English existential construction’, analyzes subject and lexical verb inversion. Based on Ronald W. Langacker’s cognitive grammar framework, the following chapter, ‘Motivating the flexibility of oriented –ly adverbs’, examines participant-oriented use of adverbs through cognitive and perceptual motivation. In the chapter, ‘The cognitive motivation for the use of dangling participles in English’, the way that participial construction is motivated in the English grammatical system is examined.
Inference is examined in a chapter that presents semantic change from the concrete meanings of temporal/spatial overlap to abstract meanings of contrast/concessive constructions, through experimental methods. In the chapter ‘The conceptual motivation of aspect’ inferences having emerged from past events are investigated in experiments that focus on imperfective and perfective sentence pairs. The following chapter identifies metaphorical motivation based on conceptual metaphor theory and the lexical-constructional model, with a focus on non-motion verbs. The next chapter focuses on the use of obligation models in English and Hungarian through exemplary cases and proposes a conceptual structure of modals in relation to grammatical construals. The final chapter of the first part of the book compares systems of referent honorifics available in both Korean and Japanese.
The second part begins with a chapter that deals with the semantics of dimensional adjectives in English and Russian, indicating that dimensional adjectives are not always used with a norm as a reference point. The next chapter examines the role of the sociocultural motivation in the metonymic use of ‘capital’ for ‘government’ in Croatian and Hungarian newspapers, showing that this usage is more frequent in languages such as English and German. The following chapter “investigates judgments of native speakers of Italian with respect to intrinsic and extrinsic motivational relations in the lexicon. The chapter ‘Motivational networks: An empirically supported cognitive phenomenon’ proposes a multidirectional network of motivated relations, rather than viewing motivation as a unidirectional process as done in the traditional studies. The last chapter of the second part of the book analyzes 2,500 frequently used words in English and German in terms of motivatability and determines that German vocabulary is more motivatable than the English vocabulary.
The editors and the authors successfully provide anyone working in human cognitive processing with in-depth analysis and discussion of motivation in grammar and the lexicon. The structure of this book will encourage readers to revive their knowledge of cognition and its place in motivation and to make a connection between the chapters in the book and the framework outlined in the introduction.