On Socio-Cultural Situatedness in Style Attribution: A Study of Style in Hungarian

Szilárd Tátrai,Júlia Ballagó

doi:10.17951/nh.2020.5.3-23

Abstract

Building upon the theoretical foundations of social cognitive linguistics, this paper makes the case for considering the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness in the intersubjective context of joint attention as a key factor in the process of style attribution. Specifically, socio-cultural situatedness is regarded as a crucial component of the speaker’s perspective, playing a decisive role in the construal of style. In order to support this central assumption, the paper presents a two-phase empirical study of style in Hungarian. In the first phase, the authors conducted a questionnaire study to find out which everyday, intuitive labels of style give evidence of the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness. The questionnaire made use of 12 excerpts of Hungarian university seminars to elicit reflections on style attributions. In the second phase, relying on the results of the first survey, a subsequent questionnaire was conducted. The aim of the second questionnaire was to operationalize folk categories of style attested in the first phase to describe style and measure stylistic markedness. Reconsidering earlier descriptive models, we found that the folk categories of style foreground different aspects of the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness which – on a more abstract level – can be successfully described by the heuristic scientific categories of socio-cultural factors, which imply the speaker’s socio-cultural attitude to different aspects of style in the recipient’s interpretation. The speaker’s socio-cultural attitude comprises her attitude to the formation of discourse, to the discourse partner, to the value of the topic, to the temporality of constructions and to the norms of the register of the discourse.

Highlights

The paper formulates its questions and answers from the perspective of social cognitive pragmatics
Reconsidering earlier descriptive models, we found that the folk categories of style foreground different aspects of the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness which – on a more abstract level – can be successfully described by the heuristic scientific categories of socio-cultural factors, which imply the speaker’s socio-cultural attitude to different aspects of style in the recipient’s interpretation
Considering style attribution, it is pivotal that the speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness does not exclusively involve context-dependent reference points for the identification of participants in the social world of the referential scene. This vantage point allows participants of the joint attentional scene to adjust their intersubjective construal of experiences to accessible socially grounded and culture-specific expectations concerning adequate construal of style. This implies that the processing of a speaker’s socio-cultural situatedness – for example, understanding that the speaker talks to her teacher as a student (or to her student(s) as a teacher) about a scientific topic in a university seminar – is a key factor during style attribution, since it makes socio-cultural attitude to style an integral part of construal

Summary

Introduction

The paper formulates its questions and answers from the perspective of social cognitive pragmatics (see e.g. Croft 2009). S social cognitive ability of joint attention as a point of departure (see Tomasello 1999; cf Sinha 2014) for describing the meaningful functioning of language (see Verschueren 1999; Verschueren and Brisard 2009). C attention to certain processes involving things, that is, to particular referential scenes. Linguistic cognition based on the functioning of joint attention is a human activity whose crucial feature is construal (see Langacker 1987; 2008). Linguistic symbols allow for highly flexible and elaborated conceptual processing of the world from various perspectives (Langacker 2008, 55–89; cf Sinha 2014; Verhagen 2007)

Methods

Results

Conclusion