The cognitive basis of newspaper discourse

The classification of newspapers according to their periodicity is based on human rhythms of everyday life. Accordingly in the UK we may find daily (Daily Mirror/ 1,554, Daily Express, Daily Mail/ 2,294, Daily Telegraph, Sun/3,043, Financial Times, Guardian), Sunday (News of the World/ 3,270, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Express, Sunday Telegraph, Mail on Sunday/ 2,274, Sunday Times), morning (Yorkshire Post, Western Mail) and evening (Belfast Telegraph, Birmingham Evening Mail) newspapers.

The communicative activity of humans and the means of mass communication are inseparable from cognition.

Cognition relates to all aspects of conscious and unconscious mental function. In particular, cognition constitutes the mental events (mechanisms and processes) and knowledge involved in tasks ranging from ‘low-level’ object perception to ‘high level’ decision-making tasks (V. Evans A Glossary: 17).

Both cognition and communication are grounded in common abilities such as memory, attention, imagination and are based on the human interaction with the world.

The newspaper discourse is the process and result of human perceptual and motor interaction with the world. The production and structure of newspaper discourse can be explained with the help of the theory of embodied mind.

In accordance with this theory our mind is embodied and consequently all human activity both conceptual and linguistic is based on human physical, cognitive and social interaction with the world. This perceptual and motor interaction with the world is limited and guided by the human orientation in the environment directed from the center to the periphery. A human being considers himself/herself as a center of the world and directs his/her look to the point on the periphery. Orientation is defined as an ability to single out an object in the conceptualizer’s field of view and establish its relation to other objects. It is connected with the need for segmentation of the received information because a human being can’t represent the world on the whole. Orientation ability encompasses both communicative and cognitive activity and is organized by image schemas – elementary, recurrent dynamic mental structures of sensorimotor origin that are the basis for more complex images of our consciousness. The component ‘image’ refers to perception as the basis for conceptualization on the one hand and on the other to their usage for formation of complex images of consciousness. The component ‘schema’ means that these mental structures operate on the high level of generalization and abstraction, representing mechanisms of perception shared by all humans. Image schemas link orientation to conceptualization and language.

Conceptulization is the way of human engaging the world both physically and mentally through perception, motor activities, memory, anticipation, prediction, generalization etc, i.e. through various mind-body activities (Langacker 2008, p. 500).

At the first level of conceptualization a conceptualizer chooses an object and establishes topological, perceptual and spatial motor relations with it by means of corresponding image schemas.

At the second level of conceptualization dynamic relations are established between referents by means of corresponding image schemas.

Topological image schemas:

UP-DOWN, BACK-FRONT, CENTER-PEREPHERY, LEFT-RIGHT, that fix the direction of a person’s look, and CLOSE-FAR that represent the mental distance of a conceptualizer from referents; these image schemas are formed in accordance with the spatial organization of our bodies (Potapenko 2009: 38). That is why the embodied mind is understood as a way of conceptualization by the analogy with the human body experience (Vorobyova 2005: 19).

Perceptual image schemas:

OBJECT - PLURAL – COUNTABILITY – MASS represent the change of the image of the physical object while approaching and distancing.

Spatial motor image schemas:

SURFACE (BOUNDARY) – CONTAINER – EMPTY (FULL) – INCLUSION (EXCLUSION) – CONTENTS determine gradual involvement of the addressee into the discourse representing manipulation with different objects.

Dynamic image schemas connect objects of different degree of salience by force or movement. Kinetic image schema PATH relate objects to the initial, middle and final points. CYCLE represents the coincidence of the initial and final points.

Force image schemas have such components as Source, Goal and Vector and underlie the relations between the referents:

ENBLEMENT/DISABLEMENT; BLOCKAGE/REMOVAL of BLOCKAGE; COUNTERFORCE/REMOVAL of COUNTERFORCE; COMPULSION/REMOVAL of COMPULSION; AVERTION; ATTRACTION

So, all the described above image schemas are the building blocks of mental activity involved in constructing newspaper discourse.

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