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Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
Edited by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 13] 2020
► pp. 75–110

Chapter 5
The representation-cohesion-stance hypothesis

| University of Helsinki
This chapter argues that if we conceive of linguistic signs as inherently social signs, we should be able to capture social meaning at the grammatical level of the linguistic sign itself, not only in its use. It proposes that a way to do so is through analysing the linguistic sign as consisting of three semiotic modes, a symbolic, an iconic and an indexical mode. Using a descriptive grammatical approach, it illustrates these modes on the basis of a discourse structuring marker in the Australian Aboriginal language Ungarinyin and describes a linguistic methodology that applies separate analytical tools to each of the linguistic semiotic modes in order to capture interactions between these modes. This approach is referred to as the representation-cohesion-stance hypothesis. It is argued that only by accounting for non-symbolic meaning in a similar way that linguistics has traditionally accounted for symbolic meaning, we can develop a rounded view of socio-culturally conventionalised meaning.
Keywords: semiotic, cohesion, stance, sociality and grammar, Ungarinyin (Worrorran), Peirce
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • The limits of grammar
  • A descriptive challenge: The Ungarinyin definite subject marker
    • Conventional meaning of the Ungarinyin definite subject
    • Definite subject clustering in discourse
  • Grammar as a social instructive tool and a semiotic hybrid
    • Grammar is multimodal, in a Peircian sense
    • Grammatical signs as instruction
    • The linguistic sign as instructive modes
  • Representation, cohesion, stance
    • The definition of the definite subject reformulated in semiotic terms
    • Cohesion
    • Definite subject markers with a dominant indexical mode: cohesion-stance transgression
  • Discussion
    • Representation, cohesion and stance and the analytical paradox of cognitive-functional grammar
    • The hypothesis
  • Conclusion: Grammatical analysis and the linguistic sign in flux
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.13.05spr
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Claire Bowern
2023. The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages, DOI logo

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