This volume attempts to reconcile cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology by investigating and highlighting the explanatory power of cognitive linguistics with respect to cultural and social phenomena. It also investigates the feasibility of incorporating empirical and discursive methods into cognitive linguistic research.
This volume consists of twelve chapters. Chapter 1, the introduction, mainly explains the timeliness of developing combined paradigms and disciplines for studying language, culture, and cognition. It also briefly reviews existing significant collections, which highlights the uniqueness and continuity of this collection.
Chapters 2 to 4 form Part 1. Chapter 2 rejects the traditional distinction between the lexicon being culturally influenced and grammar being cognitively determined and argues that they actually form a continuum of meaningful structure. This chapter also stresses the importance of combining cognitive linguistics and anthropology in studying the cultural basis of linguistic meanings. Chapter 3 investigates the domain of emotion from cognitively informed historical and cultural perspectives, which demonstrates the integrated nature of its cultural transmission and cognitive reproduction. Chapter 4 examines diachronic change in the meaning of a Cantonese proverb and concludes that the meaning of constructional idioms shifts in response to the change of focal ICMs (George Lakoff's ‘idealized cognitive models’) and discourse domains.
Chapters 5 to 7 form Part 2. Chapter 5 elaborates on the multidisciplinary nature of cultural linguistics, and the culturally constructed nature of conceptualizations. It also argues that applications of cultural linguistics are potentially fruitful. Chapter 6 focuses on the cultural construction of the self in the Japanese language, revealing that a schema termed ‘sloppy selfhood’, which incorporates human beings and natural phenomena, is prominent in Japanese. Chapter 7 proposes a hypothesis that verbal language originated in prehistoric ceremonies and particularly emphasizes the significance of intersubjectivity.
Chapters 8 to 11 make up Part 3. Chapter 8 analyzes perspective-taking in talking about the domain of space among several Japanese rock climbers and corroborates the suggestion that ‘intersubjectivity is socially and interactionally oriented and represents variable levels of realizations’ (p. 210). Also taking an intersubjective stance to discourse, chapter 9 studies the similarities and differences among linguistic anthropology, cognitive anthropology, and cognitive linguistics and suggests that they can be combined in an empirical cycle of research. By analyzing collected data concerning the metaphor ‘experiences as resources’, chapter 10 concludes that the discursive form of metaphors is increasingly influenced by small stories in late modernity. Chapter 11 analyzes the discourse of psychotherapy and shows that the use of hedging expressions manifests doctors’ tension between the need to use metaphoric expressions in describing patients’ issues and the need to keep a professional image of themselves. Chapter 12 is also Part 4, and it mainly summarizes the developmental characteristics of cultural cognitive models and proposes a more synthetic and biological-evolutionary framework.
In short, this volume is comprehensive and informative in its discussion of how linguistic anthropology can be combined with cognitive linguistics, and it deserves careful reading by researchers in related fields.
