John R. Taylor & Robert E. MacLaury (eds.), Language and the cognitive construal of the world. (Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs, 82). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyer, 1995. Pp. xiii, 406. DM 178.00.

Abstract

This ambitious volume succeeds in pulling together diverse approaches to surveying and analyzing human culture through human linguistic ability, as viewed by linguists and anthropologists. It does not, by any measure, take an extreme Whorfian view – or, for that matter, an extreme anti-Whorfian view – of the relationship between language and culture; rather, it sets forth a series of ideas about the mediating role of cognition in the ways in which we view and talk about the world around us. This is not a surprising stance for the editors; Taylor has long been a proponent of the semantics-based theory of cognitive grammar (cf. Taylor 1995), and MacLaury has recently published a study (1997) of color terminology within an offshoot of cognitive grammar called vantage theory.