Review of Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar,

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the various subfields of linguistics, as envisaged from a cognitive grammar perspective. It is divided into two parts; the first half is the ‘‘basic specifications’’: issues related to psycholinguistics, acquisition, language and the brain, and evolution of language. The second part elaborates on the ‘‘building blocks’’ of language, namely words, sentences, meaning, et cetera ending finally with ‘‘a crash course in cognitive grammar’’. Broadly, the book provides some critical insights into the existing rationalist trend in linguistics – the generative approach – and suggests alternatives to developing ‘‘psychologically realistic’’ grammatical models. One underlying theme of the book is the relevance of interdisciplinary research and its benefits for linguistic theorizing. As the author notes in her introduction, that though linguistics is often defined as ‘the branch of cognitive science dealing with language’, ‘‘most linguists hasten to add, it is an ‘independent branch’, by which they mean that language can, and should, be studied in its own terms, without reference to psychological or neurological concepts and theories’’ (p. 1). This problem, as the author laments, becomes more telling with generativist linguists’ obsession with linguistic competence rather than performance. This lopsidedness begets linguistic theories which are neither psychologically nor biologically real, thus endangering the (apparently) more desirable course of the discipline toward becoming an empirical science – a science whose theories base on actual usage of language, rather than being motivated by formal elegance.