Construal and Linguistic Coding of Narrative Events

The unique strength of the current work is the author's attempt to create his own framework for investigating construal, (…) drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives that have never before been brought together for this purpose. Thus, the empirical part of the monograph is deeply situated within the field of Second Language Acquisition, with its focus on the processing of language by L2 learners. (…) Since construal as such, the pivotal concept of the monograph, is a notion developed within Cognitive Linguistics, the major theoretical orientation of the book is quite obviously on theories developed within this field, (…). However, the author is not satisfied with such a narrow focus and expands his framework by connecting the concept of construal to the theoretical perspectives developed in other disciplines, such as philosophy, psycholinguistics, or cognitive psychology. An important and innovative approach to the notion of construal proposed in the volume is viewing attention, with its related concept of cognitive salience, as the most superordinate process in construal. This novel approach opens up exciting opportunities for future research projects, which will certainly be stimulated by the many excellent ideas and the sound and logical theoretical framework present in the current work.

Reviewer Prof Anna Cieślicka