Reviewed by Eve Lacivita, Northeastern Illinois University

The Annual review of cognitive linguistics compiles publications related to the discipline of cognitive linguistics (CL). The 2003 volume includes eleven articles, an interview with George Lakoff, and two book reviews.

In ‘Toward a corpus-based identification of prototypical instances of constructions’, Stefan Th. Gries proposes a corpus-based method to identify prototypical instances of categories and quantify similarity between category members. In ‘Entering in Spanish: Conceptual and semantic properties of entrar en/a’, Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano responds to Sotaro Kita’s previous work that challenged the universality of primitives. Kita had demonstrated that some primitives are absent in Japanese entering events. Here, Ibarretxe-Antuñano explores the same events in Spanish and finds that they are conceptualized as motion involving a boundary crossing, in which the nature of the crossing and its force dynamic relationship influence which verb is used.

In ‘The construal of atemporalisation in complement clauses in English’, Zeki Hamawand argues that atemporal complementizers have conceptual as well as syntactic functions when indicating  a speaker’s construal of a situation. Hamawand also explores polysemy in complementizers, assigning prototypical and peripheral meanings to several forms. In ‘Talking about space: Image metaphor in architectural discourse’, Rosario Caballero challenges the treatment of image metaphor as a special case independent of conceptual metaphor. She argues that in architecture, image metaphor is not arbitrary but necessary, due to the challenge of describing space. Moreover, Caballero provides evidence for conventionalized, productive image metaphor in architectural reviews.

Ana Ortigosa Pastor uses construction grammar to describe the grammatical construction of several temporal adverbs, including syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic information in ‘Temporal deictic adverbs: A constructionist approach’. In ‘Lexical creativity and the organization of the lexicon’, Teresa Vallès uses Catalan neologisms to explore the hypothesis that lexical creativity reflects the organization of the mental lexicon. Additionally, Vallès incorporates morphological segmentation to demonstrate lexical relationships among neologisms.

Alexander V. Kravchenko disputes the separation of semantics and semiotics in ‘The ontology of signs as linguistic and non-linguistic entities: A cognitive perspective’. He proposes an account of semiosis that considers grammar an autopoietic cognitive activity resulting from experience and interpretation, rather than a modular set of rules. In ‘The use of literally: Vice or virtue?’, Brigitte Nerlich and Pedro J. Chamizo Domínguez explore the uses of literally, particularly its much-criticized application to a nonliteral event, such as I saw journalists becoming animals, literally. They conclude that the disputed use provides value by intensifying a metaphoric phrase such that the phrase is interpreted in its strongest possible sense.

In ‘Is the notion of linguistic competence relevant in Cognitive Linguistics?’ Carita Paradis discusses the usefulness of the concept of linguistic competence. Paradis argues that no boundary can be established between linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge, and moreover, that this distinction is irrelevant to CL, because it presupposes modularity, which CL does not admit. An interview with George Lakoff, conducted by Jesús Sánchez García, focuses on the neural theory of language (NTL) as an integrated theory of CL. NTL uses characterizations of the chemical workings of the brain to describe how properties of neural systems are manifested in grammars. Lakoff predicts that NTL will be adequate to describe most aspects of language use and anticipates a map of the mind on par with the genome project.