Linguocognitive Approach to Text Analysis

Abstract

Cognitive sciences were officially included in the nomenclature of scientific specialties in Russia in 2021. However, the issue of the subject and method of cognitive science in general and its projection on text analysis in particular remains little known to the general scientific community. Linguistic text analysis has gone through several stages of evolution. Each of them accumulates the critical aspects highlighting the necessity to search for new approaches. There are three such approaches in linguistics: structural, communicative, cognitive. The structural paradigm made it possible to solve scientific problems using the example of simple language units. However, it was experiencing serious difficulties in studying complex emergent phenomena, to which the text belongs. Some of these difficulties were leveled by including a communicative approach in the linguist’s methodological baggage. At the same time, a significant layer of factors influencing on the meaning generation of the text remained outside the scope of the research focus. As a result, the linguocognitive approach to text analysis was formed in linguistics. This made it possible to include not only linguistic structures, but also the widest range of mental structures (concepts, frames and slots, prototypes, categories, conceptual oppositions, gestalts, mental spaces and models, conceptual metaphors, precedent phenomena, semantic networks) and cognitive operations (conceptualization, categorization, inference, causal attribution, conceptual projections, blending) in the analysis. Thus, the linguocognitive approach to text analysis increases the heuristics of scientific research due to it is aimed at studying of semantic processes as mental processes.