Annual review of cognitive linguistics, vol. 3. Ed. by Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. 354. ISBN 1588114279. $114.

Reviewed by Martin Hilpert, Rice University

In its third year, the Annual review of cognitive linguistics establishes itself as a forum for cognitive linguistic research from mostly European contributors. The volume contains fourteen papers, an interview with Leonard Talmy, and a book review. The papers cover several key areas of cognitive linguistics, such as blending, grounding, metaphor, and construction grammar.

Esam N. Khalil argues that the psychological notions figure and ground cannot be equated with textual foregrounding and backgrounding. He discusses examples from newspaper texts that show a mismatch of psychological and textual salience, such that background information is textually more prominent than new information. Guillaume Desagulier proposes a blending analysis of advice-giving wanna (as in You wanna be careful!), proposing that two constructions blend together into advice-giving wanna, which inherits formal and semantic characteristics of the two input constructions. Guy Achard-Bayle studies metamorphosis and metaphor in French literary works, finding that both operations involve a semantic change, but behave differently with respect to referentiality and pronominal anaphora at the structural level.

In a case study of Spanish epistemic modals, Bert Cornillie challenges Ronald Langacker’s definition of grounding predications, which excludes elements inflecting for tense. Spanish epistemic modals have tense inflections, but Cornillie argues that they nonetheless function as grounding predications. Paul Chilton uses vector geometry to model viewpoint shifts in discourse. He illustrates the model with spatial prepositions and applies it further to the verbs come and go, tense markers, and weak and strong epistemic modality. Francisco García Jurado and Carmen Maíz Arévalo study the English idiom can’t make head nor tail and its equivalent in Latin. They analyze it in terms of a conceptual metaphor in which coherence is understood as a whole body in its default arrangement.

Yoshihiko Ikegami discusses the grammaticalization of subjectivity in Japanese, which is evident in alternate ways of expressing psychological states. These predicates are construed from either an egocentric or a third-person perspective, suggesting different conceptions of the self. Georgina Cuadrado Esclapez and Heliane Jill Berge Legrand show how scientific thought is pervaded by conceptual metaphor. They investigate the language of particle physics, in which particles and forces are metaphorically endowed with human social characteristics. Stefan Th. Gries and Stefanie Wulff demonstrate the psychological reality of English constructions in L2 learners. Comparing the responses of German subjects in a sentence-completion task against corpus data, they find that the responses reflect the English constructions, not their German translational equivalents.

Javier Valenzuela, Joseph Hilferty, and Mar Garachana study a Spanish topicalization construction in which the topic is reduplicated. They propose that the construction has a hedging function that flags the topic as a nonprototypical category member. Line Brandt and Per Aage Brandt analyze the metaphorical expression This surgeon is a butcher and argue that hearers make sense of the expression through a sequence of conceptual steps that involves blending, metaphor, and pragmatic inference. Réka Benczes finds that creative noun-noun compounds such as shoebox store and sandwich generation can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of metaphor, metonymy, and blending. M. Teresa Calderón Quindós shows the applicability of cognitive linguistics to the analysis of literary works and presents analyses of poems by Seamus Heaney. Carmen Guarddon Anelo develops a polysemy network of the Spanish preposition desde, which has spatial, temporal, and intersubjective meanings that have come about through metaphorical extension.