University Press, 2005.

Constructions of Intersubjectivity (CoI) is an important addition to the growing body of work on ‘cognitive’ and construction-based grammars, which CoI links to evolutionary issues in interesting ways. CoI also touches upon a number of fundamental (indeed philosophical) issues in the study of linguistic communication, meaning, and human cognition; it should be applauded for the explicitness with which it does so, using language as a ‘window on the mind’ (p. 210). A concrete vision of the evolution of language is endorsed, arising against the background of analyses of a number of seemingly disparate and scattered linguistic data. The book thus forms an excellent starting point to engage with foundational assumptions entering into the theoretical framework adopted. We will here equally embed our comments within a theoretical discussion at the level of frameworks. The book begins by isolating a number of seemingly unrelated ‘small’ grammatical puzzles, which later gain a theoretical significance for certain ‘big’ theoretical issues. The ‘small’ grammatical puzzles concern negation (in particular the lack of functional equivalence in the use in discourse of not impossible and possible); whether finite sentential complements in copular constructions like The danger is that depleted uranium is poisonous are subjects or predicates; and discourse connectives (e.g., concessive conjunctions like although). These three construction types form the topics of chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Chapter 5 concludes the book. We here reverse the order of ‘small’ and ‘big’ and begin ‘big’, with some claims of linguistic anthropology.