Pragma-cognitive is not an established theory or framework as it is being developed by its author as an approach to text analysis .Following are Pragma-cognitive approach tenets:
- Accepts that language use (i.e. discourse) implies that communicating humans have something in their minds and memories
- Cognitive frames are thus an important theoretical notion
- The meanings of words is their cognitive frame
- Cognitive frames are not just representations of static objects or institutions (e.g. house, houses of parliament, nation, army…), but also activities: e.g. focussed events like buying and selling, longer events like going to a birthday party, holding a political meeting, a hearing in a court of law…
- Even more specifically, dynamic frames related to activities are roughly what Teun van Dijk calls ‘context models’: our knowledge about what to do and say, how to interact, in specific situations
- Most generally, the pragma cognitive approach is grounded in a discourse ethics of the Habermasian type …
Starting with Habermas’s validity claims, the PCA is a research paradigm aiming to unify Habermas’s ethical-pragmatic framework with a scientifically grounded understanding of language, based in cognitive linguistics.
Professor Paul Chilton
Professor Paul Chilton
