Linguistic cognition and worldview

Abstract

ABSTRACT Herslund’s cognitive-perceptual and communication models, comprising a typological theory of linguistic worldview, are replaced by an integrated cybernetic-semiotic model, where language/text is understood as cognition, as individual linguistic discourse acts and collective discourse interaction. Thus, actual cognitive-linguistic communication is not situational context, but the pragmatic basis. As such, it constructs its further socio-cultural cognitive domain and its universe of discourse, characterizing it with a language-specific worldview inherent in its dynamic competence. Perceptual-actional cognition constructs the human natural Umwelt. Integrated cognition maps triune reality, with its natural, mental, and cultural dimensions. Just as the mental is an aspect of the biological world, society-culture is a construction by individual minds. Linguistic cognition is subjective discourse acts, performed by particular minds, or intersubjective discourse interaction – communication within the historical-general commind of a society-culture. Owing to the diversification of human language into divergent types of linguistic practices and traditions, interlocutors entertain specific linguistic worldviews and construct and live in divergent society-cultures. Furthermore, they have (inter)personal cognitive mappings of themselves, their interlocutors, their in-groups and out-groups, and express these identities in discourse. Since linguistic and non-linguistic cognition is integrated and displayed in consciousness, individuals inhabit diverse bio-cultural worlds-of-living – in-group homeworlds and out-group alienworlds.