Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America.
Review of Talmy, Leonard. Toward a Cognitive Semantics.
Volume 1: Concept Structuring Systems.
Volume 2: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

In the two volumes of this widely-anticipated work, Leonard Talmy systematically arrays and expands the studies that have won him immense influence as one of the most original theorists of language. Here are refined versions of classic articles such as "The Relation of Grammar to Cognition," "Fictive Motion," "How Language Structures Space," "The Windowing of Attention in Language," "Figure and Ground," "Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition," "The Semantics of Causation," "Lexicalization Patterns," "The Cognitive Culture System," and "A Cognitive Framework for Narrative Structure."

"Semantics," Talmy observes, "is intrinsically cognitive." Grammars reveal conceptual structures, expressions prompt for conceptual arrays, and linguistics is a method for discovering the way we think.

Talmy takes the view, familiar from various traditions of philology and linguistics, that language conforms to a fundamental design feature: it is divided into two subsystems, the grammatical and the lexical. The lexical subsystem consists of the "open" classes of linguistic forms, including ideophonic, adjectival, verbal, and nominal roots. In contrast, the grammatical subsystem consists of all other forms, that is, "closed" classes, and accordingly includes grammatical categories and subcategories, grammatical relations, word order patterns, and grammatical complexes such as constructions, syntactic structures, and complement structures. Sentences prompt listeners to construct cognitive representations. The lexical subsystem, for the most part, provides cues for their content, while the grammatical subsystem, for the most part, provides cues for their structure. Our capacity for language depends on our ability to integrate disparate conceptual contents and conceptual structures to create unified cognitive representations, and equally on our ability to use a relatively limited inventory of grammatical and lexical forms to prompt for virtually unlimited ranges of cognitive representations.

Crucially, there is an elaborate semantics of grammar, that is, a closed-class semantics, informed by a system of constraints having to do with topology, perspective, attention, viewpoint, figure and ground, time and space, location and motion, and force and causation. Talmy analyzes the semantics of grammatical and lexical subsystems and the ways in which they interact. The grammatical subsystem, for example, provides topological rather than Euclidean cues: English deictics this and that, the English preposition across, and the English past tense inflection -ed are all closed-class items that are neutral with respect to magnitude of space or time, allowing us to say with equal felicity, "This ant crawled across my palm" or "This bus drove across the country." These grammatical forms prompt for topological structure, for mental "rubber-sheet geometry" that can be stretched indefinitely without challenging semantic constraints. Resolving neutralities in any given cognitive representation is principally the responsibility of the lexical subsystem. Talmy similarly analyzes other kinds of closed-class neutrality, having to do with shape, closure, discontinuity, bulk, token, and substance.

Grammatical forms point to various conceptual categories, which Talmy calls "schematic categories." These schematic categories further organize into extensive and complicated systems for structuring concepts, which he calls "schematic systems." The schematic systems concern configurational structure, perspective, the distribution of attention, force dynamics and causation, and cognitive state. Talmy explains various organizing principles that cut across these schematic systems and that help to coordinate the grammatical and lexical subsystems.

There are many original, fundamental, and extended theoretical proposals in these volumes. Talmy is widely known, for example, for his work on the closed-class element he calls "satellite," which combines with verb to create the constituent "verb complex," as in English "misfire," where the satellite is "mis-," and "start over," where the satellite is "over." He analyzes the notions associated with satellites (satellites in English are mostly involved in the expression of Path) and surveys the differences between languages that characteristically map the core schema into the verb ("verb-framed languages") and those that characteristically map it onto the satellite ("satellite-framed languages").

An impression of Talmy's original cast of mind and method is available from even a brief glance at his account of "fictive motion," that is, of "the extensive representation of nonveridical phenomena - especially forms of motion - both as they are expressed linguistically and as they are perceived visually." Talmy seeks to account for expressions that depict motion when there is no physical occurrence of motion: This fence goes from the plateau to the valley; The cliff wall faces toward/away from the island; I looked out past the steeple; The vacuum cleaner is down around behind the clothes-hamper; The scenery rushed past us as we drove along.

In such cases, one conceptual input to the cognitive representation has no motion but the other has motion. These inputs are integrated into a scene of "fictive motion." Such a conceptual scene looks at first blush more complex than its conceptual inputs, but it creates a familiar pattern at human scale involving location, shape, contiguity and motion. Talmy’s example, “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada,” gives us global insight into the location of the mountain range and its spatial relationship to Mexico, Canada, and the United States. It presents a static scene using motion: goes all the way from . . . to . . . . Far from being unusual, this is a standard strategy in many and perhaps all languages, as Talmy surveys. Languages systematically and extensively refer to stationary circumstances by means of forms and constructions whose basic reference is to motion. “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada” prompts for a cognitive representation in which a relevant dimension of the static object, the horizontal, is now the trajectory of motion, and in which there is now a trajector that moves in time along the trajectory, from Mexico to Canada. The grammatical construction that evokes this cognitive representation normally assigns the trajector to the subject position and the movement to the verb (“Marie goes to the store”). But in this case the construction uses the label for the trajectory in the subject position: “The mountain range goes from Mexico to Canada.”

The resulting cognitive representation now has a human scale scene in which a trajector moves in a human-scale temporal interval along a human-scale path. Space and time have been scaled down, and a simple, ideal path has been created along which there is motion. Understanding the fictive motion scene in this way allows one to do the correct projection back to the static input with the mountain range, and to construct the appropriate relevant configurations of the range and the countries.

Talmy provides a taxonomy of sources of motion for fictive motion scenes. The mountain range scene has an input with a trajector moving along a linear path, but another of Talmy’s examples, “The field spreads out in all directions from the granary” has a motion input in which a material substance (like oil or wine) distends or diffuses from an initial spot.

The formal integration in fictive motion expressions is particularly noticeable in what Talmy calls “Access Path” expressions, such as “The bakery is across the street from the bank.” The static input could be expressed by “The bakery is on the street.” The motion input has something departing from one point, traversing some surface, and arriving at another point. The words “across” and “from” come from the motion input. The expression for the fictive motion scene combines grammatical elements from the two inputs, so we can say, “The bakery is across the street from the bank.” The mountain range example and the bakery example have the same motion input. In the bakery example, the motion input has a surface that is traversed. Its counterpart in the static input is the street. In the fictive motion scene, the surface traversed is fused with the street, and we can use the label “the street” to pick out that fused element and we can put “the street” in the grammatical position for the surface traversed (“across the street”). Similarly, the endpoints of the trajectory in the motion input have counterparts in the static input: the bank and the bakery. In the fictive motion scene, we fuse the endpoints of the trajectory with their counterparts in the static input, and we can use the labels from the static input (“the bank” and “the bakery”) to pick out the fused elements, and place those labels in the grammatical positions for the endpoints. Talmy discusses a range of other categories of fictive motion, involving paths of emanation, orientation, radiation, sensation, pattern, advent, and coextension.

Talmy's study of fictive motion is extraordinarily wide-ranging and deep, as are his similar studies of the way in which language schematically structures space, foregrounds and backgrounds conceptual structure, relates events, deploys a model of force dynamics, distinguishes causative situations, and so on.

The publication of this work is a monumental landmark in the history of the study of grammar and semantics.