SOCIOCOGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND THE STUDY OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES

SOCIOCOGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND THE STUDY OF SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES

Author:  O.K. Iriskhanova

Affiliation:  Centre for Sociocognitive Discourse Studies at MSLU

Abstract:  Within sociocognitive linguistics, the notions of social knowledge and its structures are central. Cognitive researchers have offered a number of terms to refer to these structures: social stereotypes, context models, ICM, cultural scripts. Offering the notion of sociocultural model (SCM), the author distinguishes between two types of SCM–for social prescription and social adaptation. Prescriptive models are usually fixed, conceptually determined and reproduced (games, rituals, kinship terms, etc.). SCM for social adaptation are more variable, indeterminate and can be produced in discourse (social prestige). 
A corpus analysis of semantic and functional features of Russian and English words of prestige shows that the model of prestige consists of two components – propositional and evaluative. The first one is fixed and represents general relations between prestigious objects and people. The second component is a scale of prestige, with entities being evaluated against it. Since the criteria for evaluation can be unclear (prestigious cars vs. prestigious professions), the SCM of prestige becomes partially indeterminate. 
The study of multimodal TV commercials supports the idea that with the status symbols that are widely recognized as prestigious objects (e.g. expensive watches or cars), the SCM of prestige becomes less explicit verbally, more explicit visually, and displays more variation in discourse. An added benefit of the distinction between prescriptive and adaptive SCM is that they become an effective instrument for the analysis of different types of discourse.

Keywords:  sociocognitive linguistics, sociocultural model, variability, indeterminacy

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Pages:  5-17