Hong Gao, The physical foundation of the patterning of physical action verbs: A study of Chinese verbs. (Travaux de L'Institut de Linguistique de Lund, 41.) Lund, Sweden: Lund University, 2001. Pp. xiv, 265. NP.

Abstract

This book presents a semantic study of Chinese physical action verbs from a cognitive perspective. The study seeks to understand the cognitive basis of language by uncovering the relationship between language structure and cognitive structure, and to demonstrate “how cognitive, perceptual, or experiential facts constrain or otherwise determines the linguistic facts” (p. 230). In its semantic analysis of physical action verbs, the study illustrates the role of body parts in the semantic construction of the verbs depicting the physical actions performed by those body parts. In the discussion of relationships between language construction and human body action, the book's central argument is that the event structures of physical action verbs are constructed not arbitrarily but through systematic cognitive processes in relation to both human physical reality and concrete reality in the world. By explicating linguistic structure on the basis of human cognition and human experience, the author attempts to verify that the categorizations of language entities reveal, to a large extent, the nature of human experience and perception of physical reality. The assumption is that the nature of linguistic richness in both semantic and syntactic structures is a reflection of the development of human perception of the experiential reality.