In search of cognitive and linguistic methodology for discourse studies

Abstract

This work is devoted to the study of theoretical and methodological problems of modern discourse open for discussion. Being an object of interdisciplinary interests, discourse studies profess various methodological principles and theoretical categories. Taking into account the positions of different humanities using the discourse category, the authors of the article consider the methodological primary basis of discourse-analysis to be the identification of communicative-cognitive correlation of a literary text’s speech meaning and discourse forming concepts as the basis of author’s and reader’s thought code. The category “discursive activity” introduced and interpreted by the authors correlates with linguistic activity: the four-element model of cognition and communication. It is proved that discursive activity is built not on the traditional three “whales”, but four. A communicative event is projected by: 1) object realities; 2) sensual perception of realities in the form of objective and previously stored in memory phonetic representations; 3) a discursive model of the future (supposed) text, which is constructed by ideal phenomena — concepts; 4) such ideal units as “internal words”. This allows for the interpretation of discourse as a schematic means of mentally constructing a communicative situation in the aggregate of its verbal/non-verbal elements. The developed discourse analysis in the work is based on the interpretation of a system of concepts, which are a cognitive substrate of a discursive situation and serve as the pre-text model of the event experienced by communicants as a real fact. An adequate interpretation of semantic relations between keywords and basic concepts is important in the developed cognitive-linguistic methodology of discourse analysis. The contextual interpretation method and discourse analysis were used in the work.