Mediating Cultures: A Cognitive Approach to English Discourse for the Social Sciences

This book introduces functional, cognitive-semantic, and pragmatic concepts into the description of syntactic structures and applies them to the processes of acquisition and use of English as a 'lingua franca' in social contexts of intercultural communication. The forms and functions of the English language are investigated in relation to authentic instances of written and spoken genres concerning a number of discursive domains in the Social Sciences. Such domains range from socio-political, economic, and educational areas of debate in Great Britain and in the USA to transcriptions of authentic cross-cultural conversations between speakers belonging to different ethnic communities and often using dialectal or interlanguage varieties of English. This implies a systematic analysis of the extent to which such genres, and the registers and dialects actualizing them, may be influenced by the speakers/writers' different cognitive strategies and native pragmalinguistic uses in such a way as to determine the success or failure of cross-cultural interactions in social practice. The underlying theoretical assumption, therefore, is a view of discourse focused on the socio-cognitive nature of communication, emphasizing contextual and conceptual aspects of meaning which are not only determined, but also challenged and renegotiated by the social relations and identities of the participants in intercultural communication. The book primarily addresses university students interested in the use of specialized registers and varieties of English for applications in the professional domains of the Social Sciences. It has been designed in a modular and flexible format so as to allow its principled use at different levels of linguistic-communicative competence (from the pre-intermediate to the advanced levels), and to ensure the gradual, accessible and contextual introduction of key concepts and terms from cognitive semantics, transformational syntax and discourse pragmatics. These concepts are then applied to the description of English grammatical structures and brought to bear pragmatically on a number of selected extracts from authentic texts concerning relevant social issues, such as: immigration, social policy, educational policy, social exclusion, youth culture, popular scientific discourse, inter-ethnic conflicts and unequal encounters, among many others. Sets of 'tasks' are then designed to engage students in a critical evaluation of 'what is said and how it is said' in such texts and to provide suggestions for social action projected into the contexts of students' future work. The focus, in sum, is on critical discourse awareness as a basis for effective social action.