Book review

Aspects of Meaning Construction

Günter Radden, Klaus-Michael Köpke, Thomas Berg and Peter Siemund (eds). 2008. Aspects of Meaning Construction. Amsterdam and Phildelphia: John Benjamins

Reviewed by Réka Benczes, Eöotvos Loránd University, Budapest.

Aspects of Meaning Construction is a collection of fourteen articles that have been put together in a Festschrift for Klaus-Uwe Panther. At first glance, the title appears slightly vague (and there is no subtitle either to help narrow down the topic); however, the introduction clearly explains what the editors mean by the notion of "meaning construction". Radden et al. define meaning construction as an "on-line mental activity whereby speech participants create meanings in every communicative act on the basis of underspecified linguistic units" (p. 3).

This definition has several noteworthy aspects. First, it concentrates on the role of the speaker: as the editors emphasize, meaning construction is often biased towards the role of the listener. Second, it highlights the dynamic nature of meaning construction: both interlocutors continuously "fine-tune" and "redefine" (p. 4) the communicative value of each utterance. Third, the definition directs attention to the implicit nature of communication; hearers routinely--and unconsciously--gather information by drawing all sorts of inferences from what has been said.

The above definition has been heavily influenced by the seminal work of Panther and Thornburg on meaning construction (e.g., 2003, 2004; Panther 2005), who have argued that the dynamic nature of on-line comprehension cannot be based on conscious reasoning, as that would intolerably slow down the interpretation process" (Panther and Thornburg 2004: 2). Panther and Thornburg propose instead that when reasoning, we heavily rely on "inferential pathways" (ibid.), which are mostly metonymic in nature.

The view of metonymy as a natural inference schema has been the inspiration of many of the contributions in the volume. However, the strength of the book lies in the fact that the papers take this as a loose framework that they expand into various areas of grammar, demonstrating that meaning construction pertains to all levels of linguistic analysis and it is guided by--apart from metonymy-- metaphor and blending as well. Consequently, the first section of the book, comprising seven articles, examines how meaning construction is achieved via metaphor and metonymy. The six contributions of the second part of the volume examine the role of mental spaces and conceptual blending in meaning construction. Apart from a subject and author index, the editors have also included an index of metonymies and metaphors.

Part I: Metaphor and Metonymy

In the opening paper, Gibbs notes that psycholinguistics has not yet been able to provide empirical evidence for the cognitive linguistic assumption that speakers access conceptual metonymies when understanding metonymic utterances.

Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez and Mairal Usén examine how generic metaphors and metonymies regulate grammatical phenomena, such as the transitive construction. They claim that general patterns of metaphor and metonymy, observable at other levels of analysis, are also at work at the grammatical level.

Barcelona is concerned with the role of metonymy in understanding longer pieces of discourse. On the basis of a sentence-by-sentence analysis of a randomly selected paragraph on hiking, he concludes that understanding longer pieces of text requires the drawing of implicatures, which are, however, guided by metonymy.

Hilpert investigates what sort of conceptual shifts are involved in the lexical and grammatical extensions of body part terms coming from 76 languages. The data suggest that the main difference between lexical and grammatical extension is that the former relies on chained metonymies, while the latter is predominantly based upon an initial personification, OBJECTS ARE HUMANS.

Ziegeler demonstrates that the notion of coercion is unable to account for anomalies at the syntax/semantics interface. Two of her three examples can be explained by pragmatic inferencing and metonymy.

Brdar and Brdar-Szabó argue that the figurative uses of personal names are created in a succession of metonymic (and metaphorical) mappings. The authors emphasize that the plethora of examples that exhibit the construction of [Det + Xpersonal name + of Y], such as the Gwyneth Paltrow of the food world (referring to carrots), can only be understood by relying on our encyclopaedic knowledge about famous individuals.

Stefanowitsch argues that the understanding of metaphorical expressions is guided by a so-called "collocational overlap" between the central lexical items of the source and target domains. The hypothesis is tested against both conventionalized and non-conventionalized metaphors through a quantitative analysis.

Part II: Mental Spaces and Conceptual Blending

Langacker investigates the meaning of personal pronouns, especially I and you, which he claims are not devoid of conceptual content. He proposes that their meaning can be explained by cognitive domains, profiling, and successive levels of blending operations, where both the speaker and the hearer have reversible roles: both can be potential subjects or potential objects. Langacker concludes that intersubjectivity lies at the heart of pronoun meaning.

Nikiforidou's analysis of Greek relative clauses demonstrates that these constructions are often indeterminate in nature, allowing multiple construals between the relative and the head. The indeterminacy of the construction is well captured by blending theory, where the multiple construals can evoke different blends.

The cross-linguistic studies by Koops and Mihatsch concentrate on the role of discourse in the construction of meaning. Koops looks at the possible discourse constraints that limit the use of the it is that-construction, while Mihatsch provides a pragmatic account of how the equivalents of kind and sort in some Romance (and Germanic) languages have developed approximative functions.

Schulze's study on questions evokes Langacker's concept of intersubjectivity: in an interrogative, the EGO's cognitive state is projected on the ALTER-EGO (that is, the addressee you).

The last contribution in the volume by Wulff et al. opens up a new area in construction grammar: the study of dialectal variation. A corpus analysis of the verbal predicates that British English and American English speakers insert in the into-construction (e.g., he tricked me into employing him), reveals that British speakers tend to conceptualize causation as physical action, while Americans conceptualize causation also as communication or verbal persuasion.

Evaluation

Gibbs argues that "part of the challenge in any theory of meaning construction is to describe exactly what sorts of conceptual and pragmatic information is employed and when it is accessed during immediate understanding" (p. 26). This sentence, I believe, is the ultimate aim that the individual contributors and the editors wished to reach, and they all did so with considerable success. All in all, the result is an engaging read that well reflects the influence that Klaus-Uwe Panther (along with Linda Thornburg) has had on cognitive linguistics in general. At the same time, the stimulating contributions provide a fine perspective of where current research on meaning construction is, while also outlining the possible areas of future investigations.

References

Panther, Klaus-Uwe. 2005. The role of conceptual metonymy in meaning construction. In Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction. Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez and M. Sandra Peña (eds.), 353-86. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda Thornburg (eds.). 2003. Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda Thornburg. 2004. The Role of Conceptual Metonymy in Meaning Construction. Metaphorik.de 6, accessed 22 August 2008.

Links

Günter Radden's homepage
Klaus Panther's homepage
Aspects of Meaning Construction at John Benjamins

Commissioned 1 June 2008
Submitted 24 August 2008
Final version submitted 26 August 2008

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