Linguocognitive grounds of commemorative discourse

Abstract

The article deals with the linguocognitive aspects of commemorative discourse. Commemorative discourse is understood here as a combination of language-mediated social practices of preservation, promotion and transfer of the heritage of the past. The topicality of the present paper is determined by the need to expand the knowledge of commemorative discourse as an object of linguocognitive study. The aim of the article is to reveal and describe the ways of verbalizing the linguocognitive grounds of English-language commemorative discourse. The material is 570 English-language small-format texts published online by British, American, and Canadian politicians from 2018 till 2024. The research was conducted with general scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, description, etc.), types of analyzing language phenomena (conceptual, categorial, contextual analysis, discourse analysis) and techniques of material selection and systematization (continuous sampling, fixation of language phenomena). Having analyzed the empirical material, the author finds the principal types of knowledge represented in English-language commemorative discourse – language, intuitive, and scientific, and describes means of their verbalization. The basic linguocognitive mechanisms of meaning-making, which facilitate (re)interpretation of the past, get revealed, cognitive illusion being the most prominent of them. Cognitive illusion is serviced by mechanisms like fusion, analogy, reification, recontextualization, grounding, perspectivization, vantage point, subjectivization, and intersubjectivization.