About the Book
This volume provides a multifaceted view of certain key themes in multilingualism research today and offers future directions for this research area in the context of the multilingual development of individuals and societies. The selection of studied languages is eclectic (e.g. Amondawa, Cantonese, Bulgarian, Dene, Dutch, Eipo, Frisian, German, Mandarin Chinese, Māori, Russian, Spanish, and Yukatek, among others), they are typologically diverse, and they are contrasted from a variety of perspectives, such as cognitive development, aging, acquisition, grammatical and lexical processing, and memory. This collection also illustrates novel insights into the linguistic relativity debate that multilingual studies can offer, such as new and revealing perspectives on some well-known topics (e.g. colour categorisation or language transfer). The critical and comprehensive discussions of theoretical and methodological considerations presented in this volume are fundamental for numerous current, future, empirical and interdisciplinary studies of linguistic diversity, linguistic typology, and multilingual processing.
Table of Contents:
1. Editors and contributors; 2. Foreword: Multilingual cognition and language use (by Filipovic, Luna); 3. Introduction: Understanding multilingualism: Interdisciplinary trends - past, present, and future (by Filipovic, Luna); 4. Part I. Multilingual contrasts: Interfaces and integrations; 5. Methodological approaches in the study of linguistic relativity: Corpus method and cognitive theory (by Lucy, John A.); 6. Frequency of use and basic vocabulary (by Calude, Andreea S.); 7. A contrastive study of colour terms in French and German causal constructions (by Knop, Sabine De); 8. Compound verbs in English and Bulgarian and the relativity debate (by Bagasheva, Alexandra); 9. HERE, NEAR, FAR: Spatial conceptualisation and cognition in a cross-linguistic perspective (English vs. Russian) (by Gladkova, Anna); 10. Cognitive maps of landmark orientation (by Thiering, Martin); 11. Is space-time metaphorical mapping universal?: Time for a cultural turn (by Sinha, Chris); 12. Part II. Bilingual processing: Language representation and language use; 13. Efficiency of the bilingual mind: Clues from processing, memory, and second language acquisition studies (by Filipovic, Luna); 14. About phonological, grammatical, and semantic accents in bilinguals' language use and their cause (by Groot, Annette M.B. de); 15. Aging and bilingual processing: Age-related and individual differences in groups of early bilingual Frisians (by Houtzager, Nienke); 16. L1-based prototypicality effects in L2 vocabulary learning (by Xia, Xiaoyan); 17. Finding a wooden jandal in the jandal wood: The role of bilingualism for the interpretation of headedness in novel English compounds (by Onysko, Alexander); 18. Name index; 19. Subject index; 20. Language index
Review :
This volume moves forward the study of multilingualism by gathering research studies richly informed by language typology, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics to contrast usage, structure, and cognition in multiple languages, and to develop experimental studies of language representation and processing in the multilingual mind. This ground-breaking synthesis demonstrates the necessity of interdisciplinarity, it illustrates the insights to be gleaned from such collaborations, and it sets the stage for a new Applied Language Typology. These chapters lead the development of Cognitive Linguistics towards something more interesting still, Cognitive Multilinguistics.
Congratulations to Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz for putting together this timely and comprehensive volume on multilingualism. One cannot understand multilingualism or bilingualism without considering a range of perspectives, and this is the strength of this interdisciplinary volume. We learn about multilingualism through the lens of typological proximity, processing, and storage. We are introduced to questions of acquisition and aging, both central to multilingualism, but not always dealt with together. The wide range of topics, the inclusion of languages not commonly dealt with (how many studies are there with Yukatek as an object of inquiry?), and the diverse disciplinary perspectives make this book a must read for students and scholars of multilingualism and bilingualism.
