Studies in linguistic motivation. Ed. by Günter Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther.
Reviewed by Annalisa Baicchi,
The issue of the pervasiveness of motivation in natural language is tackled in this thought-provoking volume, which must be considered as a fundamental contribution since it reviews the current research on the topic and paves the way for future lines of investigation. The volume consists of twelve papers grouped into four sections that address the topic from four different perspectives (ecological, genetic, experiential, cognitive). In addition, Radden and Panther’s insightful introductory paper, ‘Introduction: Reflections on motivation’, offers an exhaustive overview of linguistic motivation, which ‘is receiving increasing attention in present-day functional and cognitive linguistics’ (1), and illustrates the semiotic criteria useful for its understanding.
Ecological motivation is examined by John Taylor (‘The ecology of construction’) and by Ad Foolen (‘Expressive binomial NPs in Germanic and Romance languages’). Analyzing in depth the constructional idiom Bang goes + NP[subj], Taylor argues that constructions—which are motivated when related to the other language units of phonological, semantic, and symbolic type—never occur in isolation but occupy an ecological niche within a network of relations. Foolen discusses the double-headedness in constructions like She is an angel of a child, whereby angel is the expressive head and child is the referential head, and convincingly shows that such a construction represents a highly motivated direction from conceptual content to syntactic form.
In the second section, Bernd Heine (‘On genetic motivation in grammar’) and Christian Koops (‘Emergent aspect construction in Present-Day-English’) discuss genetic motivation, a label coined by Heine to refer to the diachronic motivation. Heine takes up the categories of numerals, indefinite reference, and predicative possession to compare and contrast the structural motivation and the genetic motivation. Koops studies the grammaticalization of three constructions across languages conveying progressive meaning, and clearly shows that the progressive aspect follows from the three source concepts of location, motion, and posture.
Experiential motivation is addressed in the third section. Vyvyan Evans and Andrea Tyler, in ‘Spatial experience, lexical structure and motivation: The case on in’, brilliantly discuss the motivation of lexical structures analyzing the figurative extensions of the polysemous English particle in. John Newman, in ‘Motivating the uses of basic verbs: Linguistic and extralinguistic considerations’, examines some basic verbs from various languages in their metaphorical extensions motivated by body-based experiential concepts.
The last section takes into account cognitive motivation in full depth. Teenie Matlock, in ‘The conceptual motivation of fictive motion’, claims that, when in the presence of a fictive motion construction like the road runs along the coast, we mentally scan the trajectory and simulate motion along a path; interestingly, she shows that we construct a different dynamical representation of fictive motion depending on the verb encoding motion. Anatol Stefanowitsch and Ada Rohde, in ‘The goal bias in the encoding of motion events’, clearly demonstrate that the wider use of goal PPs is motivated by the major salience of goals of motion over sources, and by the higher information values of goal PPs, which allow for inference of initial and medial segments of a path. Gerhard B. van Huyssteen, in ‘Motivating the composition of Afrikaans reduplications: A cognitive grammar analysis’, examines the iconic motivation exemplifying cases of onomatopoeic and grammatical reduplication in Afrikaans, which he discusses from the framework of conceptual metonymy.
Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez and Olga Díez Velasco, in ‘Metonymic motivation in anaphoric reference’, tackle the thorny issue of the selection of anaphoric pronouns in the English language when they have metonymic antecedents; the authors propose a challenging solution relying on their theory of metonymic mapping. Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar, in ‘Predicative adjectives and grammatical-relational polysemy: The role of metonymic processes in motivating cross-linguistic differences’, compare some English polysemous constructions with predicative adjectives with their equivalents in Croatian, German, and Hungarian, and insightfully show that English relies on metonymic processes to rearrange argument structure and to keep the adjectival construction constant, an operation that is limited and even absent in the other three languages. Antonio Barcelona, in ‘Metonymy behind grammar: The motivation of the seemingly “irregular” grammatical behaviour of English paragon names’, focuses on the motivation of proper names used as paragon names, as in There are three Shakespeares in my college, and identifies two metonymies that motivate paragons and the behavior of paragon names.