16.2190, Review: Discourse/Cognitive Ling: Virtanen (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2190. Sun Jul 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2190, Review: Discourse/Cognitive Ling: Virtanen (2004)

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1)
Date: 15-Jul-2005
From: Joszef Nagy < nagy_marius at hotmail.com >
Subject: Approaches to Cognition through Text and Discourse 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 15:41:26
From: Joszef Nagy < nagy_marius at hotmail.com >
Subject: Approaches to Cognition through Text and Discourse 
 

EDITOR: Virtanen, Tuija
TITLE: Approaches to Cognition through Text and Discourse
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2874.html


Jozsef Marius Nagy, François-Rabelais University

INTRODUCTION

Recent developments in discourse linguistics as well as in cognitive 
linguistics have highlighted the common interest of these approaches of 
language. But, despite their share interest in issues of discourse and 
cognition, there is a wide gap between them caused by differences in the 
frameworks and perspectives adopted for study.

The aim of the volume edited by Tuija Virtanen is to contribute to 
bridging that gap by an interdisciplinary debate. The volume is organised 
in individual chapters which, despite the variety of methods adopted for 
study, focus on text and discourse in a given situational context and on 
individual and distributed cognition. As Virtanen points out in the 
introductory chapter "what is shared is an awareness for the fact that 
discourse and cognition can only be studied with the help of discourse and 
cognition". The individual contributions deal with a large area of data 
from a several languages (including discourse in bilingual settings) 
ranging from narrative to non-narrative, spoken to written, informative to 
literary, experimental to authentic, professional genres to impromptu 
speech, from public to private or semi-private discourse. 

DESCRIPTION

In the opening chapter (Text, discourse and cognition: An introduction), 
Tuija Virtanen discusses the relation between language, discourse and 
cognition. Text and discourse linguistics focus on text/discourse in 
context. Virtanen highlights the bi-directional view of text and context: 
if the form of a particular text is affected by its context, texts and 
discourses themselves contribute to the construction, maintaining and 
alteration of contexts. In cognitive linguistics, much studies dealing 
with text and discourse has been centred on individual cognition, 
i.e. "the inferences that people are required to make to interpret 
discourse, and the assumptions they seem to be making about their 
interlocutors' consciousness and memory constraints as manifested in 
discourse". The author argues convincingly for a shift of interest 
to 'distributed cognition'. A central area in the study of discourse and 
cognition is the analysis of the variation across texts and discourses. In 
Virtanen's opinion, there are two essential dimensions of discourse 
variation: text types and genres, both notions being prototypical 
categorizations. Text types "reflect the way in which we view reality". As 
she did earlier (cf. Virtanen 1992), the author argues for a distinction 
between two basic, idealised, text types: the narrative, who "involves 
human beings in a dynamic series of actions that have an outcome of some 
sort different from the situation at the beginning of the series", and the 
non-narrative (argumentative). Genres are closely related to particular 
socio-cultural contexts. They are part of our distributed cognition or the 
shared knowledge of a discourse community.

In chapter 2, entitled "Language, discourse and cognition: retrospect and 
prospects", Robert de Beaugrande presents a dialectical model of language 
and discourse such that language, conceived as "a theory of human 
knowledge and experience", "specifies the standing constraints (i.e. what 
words usually mean), whereas discourse, conceived as practice of human 
knowledge and experience, "manifests emergent constraints (i.e. what the 
words mean in this particular stretch of discourse)". Hence, theory of 
language turns into 'theoretical practice', essentially 'practice-driven', 
and practice of discourse into 'practical theory', essentially 'theory 
driven'. Similarly, 'cognition' and 'language' interact in a dialectical 
cycle, such that "cognition generates meanings, whereas language 
determines meanings". Meanings are conceived not as mere units, but as 
events in "a dialectical process which always has a context as its 
cognitive architecture". A great challenge for cognitive linguistics, and 
a possible way to bridge the gap between text linguistics and cognitive 
linguistics, is the study of meaning by examining a "very large corpora of 
text and discourse". In the final of his contribution, the author argues 
in favour of what he calls "cognitive text linguistics".

In her paper (On the discourse basis of person agreement), Anna Siewierska 
examines person agreement making cross-linguistically. Hence, she 
critically discusses two diachronic scenarios that have been proposed in 
the literature for its development. The first, proposed by T. Givon, also 
called NP-detachment, postulates that person agreement markers originate 
in the third person pronouns. In the second, elaborated by Mira Ariel on 
the basis of accessibility theory, the gramaticalization of person 
agreement markers originates in the first and second person pronouns. 
Siewierska argues for an extension of Ariel's model to third person forms 
as well as to object functions too.

In chapter 4, entitled 'The information structure of bilingual meaning: a 
constructivist approach to Californian Finnish conversation', M. M. 
Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest examines information structure in impromptu speech 
emerging in both monolingual and bilingual contexts, using the model of 
Theme-Rheme-Mneme. The third element, Mneme (close to the 'tail' of 
Functional Grammar or to Lambrecht's Construction Grammar 'antitopic'), 
refers to formal properties (a flat intonation) and semantic ones 
(supposedly shared knowledge, affective modulation). The analysis of the 
Californian Finnish narratives shows that there is a tendency for the 
Rheme or the Mneme to be marked by code-switching from Finnish to English. 
In conversation, code-switching is motivated b situational needs (e.g. the 
presence of a monolingual addressee or the intention to be exact about 
referents related to life in the USA) or the interlocutors 'memory 
processes' (e.g. memorized social situation). The chapter deals also with 
the problem of quantitative memory exemplified on the basis of a 
monolingual (Sami) and a bilingual (Finnish Californian) corpus. In Sami 
contexts, men and women manifest different mechanism of remembering dates, 
estimating distances. In Californian Finnish contexts, the sex differences 
concern code-switching at temporal signposts of a story.

Chapter 5 (Point of departure: cognitive aspects of sentence-initial 
adverbials) explores the discourse functions of sentence-initial 
adverbials (i.e. adverbs, prepositional phrases, noun phrases, phrases and 
clauses) in written texts from a cognitive point of view. Virtanen focuses 
her analysis on the "prototypical adverbials of time, place and manner". 
The analysis shows that sentence-initial position has a great cognitive 
potential, creating coherence and determining point of view for what 
follows. Particular categories of adverbials are 'professionalized' in 
given discourse functions indicating manner of speaking, beliefs, 
attitudes and so forth. Finally, sentence-initial adverbials can be 
related to distributed knowledge as they can be connected to the socio-
cultural context.

Chapter 6 entitled 'What is foregrounded in narratives. Hypothesis for the 
cognitive basis of foregrounding' is by Brita Wårwik. The author explores 
the parallels between the textual foreground-background distinction and 
perceptual and cognitive principles of organization. The foregrounding and 
backgrounding of elements in narratives is analysed by three cognitive 
perspectives: the figure-ground distinction, the EVENT prototype and 
salience, including also a consideration of the role of iconicity.

The contribution of Lita Lundquist (From legal knowledge to legal 
discourse and back again) deals with the analysis of expert and non-expert 
knowledge of two types of legal concepts: 'contract' and 'judgement'. 
Using the semantic notion of 'qualia' borrowed from Pustejovsky's works 
(cf. The Generative Lexical, 1995), the author shows the great difference 
that exists between the knowledge structure of expert and non-expert text. 
The analysis highlights that experts not only use a higher number of 
qualia than non-experts but they are also able to recognize more qualia 
than a non-expert one. 

In chapter 8 Anne Marie Bülow-Møller (Conditionals: your spaces or mine) 
proposes a study of conditionals in context arguing that classifications 
based on decontextualized sentences do not hold in practice. The analysis 
shows that use of conditionals in argumentative discourse cannot be 
accounted for without a consideration of the context and the communicative 
strategies of the interlocutor engaged in the discourse.

The paper of Martina Björklund (Communicative fragments and the 
interpretation of discourse) focuses on the analysis of literary 
discourse. The author argues, following Gasparov, the essential role of 
the recognition of communicative fragments with their mental 
representations and the whole communicative landscape they evoke (genres, 
styles, thematic fields, concrete texts and utterances) in the 
perception/interpretation of discourse, of any discourse not just literary 
one. In the conception of Gasparov, communicative fragments are "discourse 
fragments of various lengths, stored n the speakers' memory as whole fixed 
elements, i.e. they are not generated by the speaker according to 
grammatical rules". Communicative fragments are given in a dynamic way 
such that is by principle impossible to say where one communicative 
fragment ends and where another begins.

In the final chapter of the volume (Drawing the line: a contested 
conceptual model in Danish 'child care talk'), Peter Harder investigates 
the negotiation of common ground, through the analysis of a particular 
conceptual model in a Danish context, that of 'drawing the line' (groense 
metaphor) in the interaction between adults and children from whom they 
are responsible. The metaphor is used about situations where the issue 
comes up whether adult should restrain the children's activity or not. The 
author highlights the role of mapping from source to target domain "as a 
social process rather than a purely conceptual one" and argues for the 
conception of conceptualization as an ongoing process "where mental 
structures meets actual experience and there is a struggle to impose some 
conceptual order in it" rather than as a product, i.e. "as a part of a 
fully mapped-out conceptual world".

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The volume represents an important contribution to the development of both 
text/discourse linguistics and cognitive linguistics. The emphasis 
on 'distributed cognition' in several articles makes possible the focus on 
the cultural dimension of cognitive sciences and the elaboration of a 
semiotics of culture. This fact implies the focus on "the fundamental 
character of creation inherent to the cognitive essence of language" 
(Coseriu, 1952/1991), which, unfortunately, lack in many works done in the 
area of cognitive linguistics. Hence, I completely agree with the critical 
remarks raised against cognitive semantics by Coseriu (1990). A text, as 
Rastier (2001) points out, is not a set of cognitive schemata. Its 
structure doesn't consist in mental correlates. A text is not a set of 
representations, but a structured set of constraints on the formation of 
representations.

REFERENCES 

Borcila, Mircea, 1997, The Metaphoric Model in Poetic Texts, in Szoveg és 
stilus. Text si stil. Text and Style, Cluj, Presa Universitara, p. 97-104

Coseriu, Eugenio, 1952/1991, La creacion metaforica en el lenguaje, in E. 
Coseriu, El hombre y su lenguaje. Estudios de teoria y metodologia 
lingüistica, Madrid, Gredos, p. 66-102

Coseriu, Eugenio, 1980/1997, Linguistica del testo. Introduzione a una 
ermeneutica del senso, Roma, La Nuova Italia Scientifica

Coseriu, Eugenio, 1990, Semantica estructural y semantica cognitiva, 
in "Jornadas de filologia", Barcelona, pp. 239-282

Rastier, François, 2001, Arts et sciences du texte, Paris, PUF 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jozsef Marius Nagy is a student at the François Rabelais University in 
Tours (General Linguistics and Classical Philology). His main intersts are 
in epistemology of linguistics and discourse analysis.





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