I think in RT sociocultural context is a certain subset of assumptions
existing in the cognitive environments of interlocutors. Just like any other
type of "context" it is retrieved for the online "making sense" of an
utterance (searching for relevance).
My PhD supervisor, Louis de Saussure, gave me an example of a case where
even strongly required presuppositional information is not retrieved by the
hearer because of some contextual constraint, for example pressure or
stress:
Do you feel bad about New-Year's eve taking place this year on a Friday the
13th?
which is nonsensical but in fact in a situation of stress, one easily falls
in the trap and answers the question without retrieving the presupposition.
However, in my own sociocultural context (cognitive environment) this
utterance is not nonsensical – I can easily *construct* a context in which
it makes sense (achieves positive cognitive effects without any extra
processing effort) as in Ukraine and Russia people also celebrate (an
oxymoronic) Old New Year on January 13th and this year it was on Friday too…
I think that from the cognitive point of view, "sociocultural" context is
not some specific breed of representations, different from other sets of
internalized mental representations. What makes this set distinct is that it
is shared by members of the same socio-cultural group (which I believe in
the socio-cultural research paradigms is referred to as "Bourdieu's
habitus").
All the best,
Andre Sytnyk
University of Neuchatel
P.S. can we really say "Elizabeth Black a former teacher of mine" in
English? Isn't a teacher somebody who taught you something at some point and
you on your part accepted "the teaching" as true or possibly true? Does
referring to somebody as "a former teacher" mean that you have rejected the
previously gained knowledge (just kidding)…
-----Original Message-----
Hello all,
In her new book *Pragmatic Stylistics*, (Edinburgh University Press 2006)
Elizabeth Black, a former teacher of mine, writes of RT
that "it does not consider the sociocultural context in which all language
use is negotiated" (P.115). She illustrates this with
reference to metaphor and irony, Bakhtin and Labov. I have always been under
the impression that RT is a comprehensive theory and perhaps some discussion
of the terminology it uses, such as the encyclopedia, is required. Does
anyone have any views on this?
Best wishes from Stefan
Stefan Malmberg
Måsvägen 3A1
22100 Mariehamn
Åland
Finland
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