Volume 12, Issue 1

This article reviews the theoretical and methodological status of the traditional distinction between denotational ambiguity and vagueness, concluding that it is valid and necessary to use it in modeling natural lexical representation. The definitional criterion is argued to be unreliable, but the equivocality that linguistic and logical criteria appear to exhibit does not challenge the basis of the distinction. Rather, it is argued, their use must be qualified, and in particular confined to denotational rather than referential phenomena. While it may restrict their practical utility, the weakness of these metacognitive criteria does not establish the absence of a cognitive distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. An account of polysemy is then sketched which is consistent in many respects with Tuggy's cognitive grammar model of polysemy.

This article compares verbal expressions for mental activity across a wide range of languages, extracting thereby a general framework for “folk models of thinking” that can be related to Whitehead's processual analysis of cognition. The core concepts examined are “understanding”, “knowing”, “remembering”, “thinking”, and “meaning”. It is argued that this domain is essentially organized along metonymic lines, as revealed by prevailing patterns of polysemy, although common metaphoric relationships are also widely observed. The metonymically—and causally—related subdomains correspond largely to natural experiential divisions, whereas metaphor is more language specific and varied. The status of “thinking” as an indivisible “basic” category is discussed.

This article examines the significance of the schematic domain of boundedness in adjectives. It is proposed that boundedness in adjectives is a fundamental characteristic associated with gradability. Cross-categorial correspondences are made to nouns and verbs, where boundedness is a feature of countability and aktionsart respectively. Two basic types of gradable adjectives are distinguished: those which are associated with a boundary and those which are not. It is also shown that it is possible to change the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundedness through contextual modulation. Finally, it is demonstrated that the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundaries may dominate their interpretation at the expense of the content proper, and the adjectives become more like function words than content words.

Ronald W. Langacker: Grammar and Conceptualization . (Cognitive Linguistics Research 14.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999, 427 pp., ISBN 3-11-016603-8 (Antonio Barcelona)

Gary B. Palmer and Debra J. Occhi (eds.): Languages of Sentiment: Cultural Constructions of Emotional Substrates . (Advances in Consciousness Research 18). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999, vi + 272 pp., ISBN 90 272 5138 X (Eur), 1 55619 434 X (US). (René Dirven)

In two recent issues of this journal, the question of innateness was the topic of an interesting discussion between Hilferty, Valenzuela, and Vilarroya (1998), and Jackendoff (1999). Basically, these two squibs defend opposing viewpoints with respect to what Jackendoff (1996, 1997) had termed the “paradox of language acquisition”: how can it be that the linguistic community, despite many decades (or centuries) of efforts, has so far failed to produce a single adequate description of a speaker's knowledge of his/her native language, yet every normal child manages to acquire precisely this knowledge during childhood?