Diskurs-Konstruktionen als mentale Raumkonstruktionen. Zur emotiven Funktion von Literatur aus der Perspektive kognitionslinguistischer Theoriebildungen
Authors: Mucha Katharina 
Published: October 2016

The article begins with a sketch of the state of research in cognitive science with regard to processes of constructing meaning and space in the field of the literary and everyday production and understanding of texts. Constructions of cognitive-linguistic models (conceptual blending, cognitive narratology) in connection with studies in conversational linguistics, research on language acquisition, and social-constructivist theories and ›linguistics of space‹ are considered in the process. Based on this, it is suggested that (emotive) constructions of significance and sense, processes of production and reception in everyday and literary dis­courses, should be regarded as situational and yet at the same time tied to processes of social cognition. This section is followed by a short excursus on Goodman’s theory of the symbol, which presupposes not a reality outside of language but worlds/discourses/realities motivated by cognitive constructivism, which language users produce on a socio-cultural (convention) and an individual and experiential-based level (creativity) and which is developed with a dependence on thought systems.

This is followed by a deepened representation of conceptual blending theory in combination with the discussion of frame-semantic approaches. It is pre­sumed that structures of knowledge (frames) are evoked by lexical units (frame elements) and are linked, composed, and elaborated in mental spaces (blends). Moreover, it is on the one hand assumed that frames indeed offer socioculturally anchored structures of knowledge, but that these structures of knowledge stand in a relation of dependence to thought systems and are correspondingly an­chored in emotively different ways for language users. On the other hand, it is assumed that while the linking of elements in mental spaces offers recipients a (potentially) universal possibility of spatiotemporal localizing (for example, from X to Y MOVEMENT), it is at the same time tied to processes of social cognition that for their part are supplied by sociocultural and individual experientially-based structures of knowledge (frames). These theorems are then exemplified by selected literary examples (of the beginnings of novels).

This is followed by a sketch of the research on the topic of »language and emotion«. Here, it is assumed that linguistic constructions of emotions are less bound to a so-called vocabulary of emotions than they are to an online process of construction and the use of schematized discourse constructions. On the basis of social-constructivist as well as trends in cognitive grammar construction, the model of (nets of) discourse constructions is developed that is attached to the concept of the sign in construction grammar movements and the concept of the scheme in the cognitive grammar of Langacker as well as to considerations regarding Fauconnier’s notion of construction. Discourse constructions are located on an abstract schema level and represent neither language nor meaning nor reality, but solely general cognitive functions. They can hold fixed space-builders (for example, »if«) by which a mental space is marked from the outset as emotive (in the primordial sense of a marking of delight vs. aversion). Lexical elements which are instantiated, evoke in turn frames whose elements and relations in turn structure the emotively marked space and are linked to blends. Discourse constructions are thus tied on a schema level to cognitive and emotive routines and on an instantiation level on the one hand to socioculturally shaped (emotive elements of) frames and their relations and on the other hand to individual experientially-based (variable) elements of frames and their relations.

From this, I derive that emotions are socioculturally formed in their linguistic realization and arise from social cognition, habit, and routine that can also be steered and trained by literary discourse.

Drawing on a corpus-based study of Pfeil’s

Linguistic constructions in literary discourses also serve, in this perspective, as social steering instruments that offer for composition and elaboration realities of action and emotion in mental constructions of space – embedded in a specific sociopolitical context – and hence contribute to the construction of social cogni­tion. If we remove individual discourse constructions from their literary context, they represent everyday phenomena of interactions by which realities are produced. In this sense, literary constructions of reality and everyday constructions of reality can be considered as two sides of the same (emotive) coin.