Approaches to Cognition Through Text and Discourse

This book explores the overlapping area of study that discourse linguists and cognitive linguists are interested in. It procedes from considerations of information structuring, coherence and foregrounding to those of negotiation of meaning in situational and cultural contexts. The cognitive issues brought to the fore range from assumptions that we make about the interlocuters' memory constraints, the relative salience that we give to and recognize in elements of discourse, prototypicality and the figure-ground distinction reflected in language use, locative concerns, iconicity, negotiation between people or groups of people of common ground and establishment of shared conceptual models within society at large, which raises the issues of culture and ideology. The contributions, all by established linguists with highest qualifications, present new findings which have important theoretical implications. They offer unique and fresh analyses of central discourse phenomena in cognitive light.

Tuija Virtanen is Professor at Abo Akademi University, Finnland.