Mediating between Concepts and Grammar (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mediating between concepts and grammar ed. by Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe Petra Burkhardt Mediating between concepts and grammar. Ed. by Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe. (Trends in linguistics 152.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. vii, 465. ISBN 3110179024. $127 (Hb). This volume is a collection of articles from a workshop at the 2001 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) annual meeting focusing on syntax-semantics interface issues. The editors, Holden Härtl and Heike Tappe, selected a broad variety of contributors, who agree that the path from conceptualization to linguistic structure involves distinct subsystems of the language system, but who differ with respect to the specific conditions of this interaction. Part 1 focuses on language production and presents papers on the connection between preverbal messages and linguistic structures. Femke van der Meulen reports an eye-tracking experiment indicating that before verbal descriptions are uttered, the relevant information is retrieved during a ‘preview process’, which facilitates speech production. The eye-tracking and keyboard data from Philip Cummins, Boris Gutbrod, and Rüdiger Weingarten also suggest that (conceptual) preview and production processes are distinguishable. Kathy van Nice and Rainer Dietrich explain the tendency to produce animate NPs first with the high accessibility of animacy features and their facilitating effect during language retrieval. Gerard Kempen and Karin Harbusch present a probabilistic formalism to account for scrambling phenomena depending on an element’s grammatical function and shape. Effects of argument order and scope relations are discussed by Andreas Späth. Markus Guhe presents a detailed model for how conceptual information is organized incrementally before it enters the formalizer. Heike Wiese illustrates how semantics functions as an interface system that prepares conceptual information for syntactic representation and is hence capable of operating on linguistic and nonlinguistic features of meaning. Part 2 deals with temporal and spatial aspects of event conceptualization. Utilizing priming studies, Elke van der Meer, Reinhard Beyer, Herbert Hagendorf, Dirk Strauch, and Matthias Kolbe show that the processing of routine-event concepts is influenced by the distance and directionality of the contributing individual events. Investigating event segmentation across languages, Ralf Nüse presents evidence that language-specific differences arise at the interface, while general event cognition remains unaffected. Three papers discuss coercion phenomena. Maria M. Piñango provides data from processing and aphasia studies suggesting that combinatorial processes required for the interpretation of aspectual and complement coercion operate at the interface and are semantic in nature. Contrary to this view, Johannes Dölling argues for the interpretation of coercion on the basis of contextual enrichment, as do Markus Egg and Kristina Striegnitz within an NLG (natural language generation) approach. Part 3 concentrates on lexical encoding. In her discussion of German -ung-nominalizations and the range of possible thematic interpretations for post-nominal genitives, Veronika Ehrich argues for a grammatical foundation of the underlying linking principles. Andrea Schalley proposes that event encoding is guided by two principles—(conceptual) compactness and (lexical) transparency—partly depending on the number of available single stems in a language. Ladina Tschander argues that the conceptualization of path-relations controls the selection between particle verbs and verbs with directional prepositional phrases, and that particles are encoded independently in the lexicon. Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner analyze scientific abstracts to illustrate how event conceptualization and argument structure interact to achieve register-specific goals. In general, this volume highlights today’s diversity of syntax-semantics approaches, including numerous disciplines and frameworks, different experimental approaches, and various languages. It further contains research by advocates of lexical encoding, conceptual influences, and hybrids, among whom the readers can position themselves. Petra Burkhardt Yale University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America