Context of Sociocultural Knowledge in Discourse Construction

Abstract

The paper proposes a theoretical framework for the study of the relationships between culture, cognition and discourse, illustrated on the examples of conventionally assumed sociocultural knowledge that is encoded by language, on the one hand, and individually constructed sociocultural knowledge in discourse, on the other. It is argued that discourse construction is dependent on the context of sociocultural knowledge that participants obtain as members of various sociocultures. We claim that the context of sociocultural knowledge is a two-dimensional unity. Statically, it represents conceptual-and-thematic domains as cognitive models encoded by language. Dynamically, it profiles meanings participants make as the result of the interpretive process of selection, classification and evaluation that constitute the cognitive-discursive interpretant (CDI), a construct worked out in the article. Apart from constituting interpretation in discourse construction, the CDI is a technique for analyzing sociocultural discourse specificity. We present an account of what language users do when they activate sociocultural knowledge in the process of discourse construction and how they do it. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s2p25