Cognitive Models in Language and Thought

The volume offers a number of representative papers on cognitive models that are invoked when people deal with questions of social identity, political and economic manipulation, and more general issues such as the genomic discourse.

In line with the well-known volume Cultural Models in Language and Thought by Holland and Quinn (1987), the volume shows that Cognitive Linguistics has further explored the idea that we think about social reality in terms of models - 'cognitive/cultural models' or 'folk theories'. As in cultural models, the present volume demonstrates that the technical apparatus of Cognitive Linguistics can be used to analyze the various ways our conception of social reality is shaped by underlying cognitive and/or cultural models or patterns of thought, and also looks into how this is done. The new inroad the volume wants to pursue is the deliberate and explicit orientation towards a cognitive sociolinguistics, or more generally, a cognitive semiotics.

Autorentext

René Dirven is Professor Emeritus at the University of Duisburg, Germany. Roslyn M. Frank is Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, USA. Martin Pütz is Professor at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Inhalt

Introduction: Categories, cognitive models and ideologies
René Dirven, Roslyn M. Frank and Martin Pütz

Section 1: Cognitive models of linguistic variation

Cultural models of linguistic standardization
Dirk Geeraerts

How to do things with allophones: Linguistic stereotypes as cognitive reference points in social cognition
Gitte Kristiansen

Section 2: Cognitive models of cultural/social identities

Shifting identities in Basque and Western cultural models of Self and Being
Roslyn M. Frank

Language and ideology in Nigerian cartoons
Oyinkan Medubi

Three mandates for anti-minority policy expressed in U.S. public discourse metaphors
Otto Santa Ana

Has the consciousness of modern industrial societies rendered "housewife" no longer a value-free cultural model?
Lewis Sego

Section 3: Cognitive models as covert ideologies

Conceptual metaphor as ideological stylistic means: An exemplary analysis
Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen

Metaphor and ideology in the press coverage of telecom corporate consolidations
Michael White and Honesto Herrera

Section 4: Cognitive models in covert social debates

Ideological functions of metaphor: The conceptual metaphors of health and illness in public iscourse
Andreas Musolff

Genetic roulette: On the cognitive rhetoric of biorisk
Craig A. Hamilton

Deciphering the human genome: The semantic and ideological foundations of genetic and genomic Discourse
Brigitte Nerlich and Robert Dingwall