COGS 324 - Discourse and Cognition

Institution:

Case Western Reserve University

Subject:

Description:

This course explores discourse and interaction from a cognitive linguistic perspective, with special emphasis on mental space, conceptual integration, and cognitive grammar. Cognitive linguistics is a paradigm of language study that seeks to understand language structure, acquisition, and use as a function of embodied conceptualization. This means that it seeks to describe and explain language as a symbolic activity involving general cognitive processes, such as perception, attention, memory, categorization, framing and sensory-motor activities. Another burgeoning area of interest among cognitive linguists is social-cognition, gesture, and interaction. In each of these endeavors, the goal is to explain as much about language without having to posit autonomous and language-specific faculties. While cognitive linguists have always been seen discourse as a legitimate object of study, many still take the sentence, clause, and phrase as their primary unit of analysis. In this course, we shall focus on the relationship between discourse and relevant cognitive processes such as attention, memory, categorization, framing, and kinesthetic experience, with the intention of exploring who these cognitive processes shape discourse in English and other languages. We will subsequently reverse our orientation and explore how discourse (in text as well as embodied/face-to-face) in turn shapes how we pay attention, remember, categorize, frame, and even experience the world. The readings, discussion, and/or research projects for this course may include the following topics: interactional conduct, intersubjectivity, consciousness, co-speech gesture, mental spaces, prosody, time and temporality, and working memory. The international structure of this course will likely lead to focused discussion and research projects on English as a Second & Foreign Language. Offered as COGS 324 and COGS 424.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.case.edu

Phone Number:

(216) 368-2000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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