Cognitive cultural models at work: The case of German-speaking Switzerland
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Rebekka Studler
Abstract
In the German-speaking part of Switzerland, people use Swiss German and High German side by side in their daily life. This situation gives rise to various attitudes towards both of these two varieties. Interestingly, some of these attitudes seem to be partly in conflict. The aim of this paper is to show that these attitudes are not necessarily conflicted but rather that such attitudes normally have a multidimensional character. Multidimensional attitudes can be traced back to multidimensional mental models on which people naturally draw. In applying Berthele’s (2010) cluster model, which combines Geeraerts’s (2003) rationalist and romantic models for standardization, the paper illustrates, based on a recent study, which mental models have to be operative to conceptualize the complex frames of the two varieties in use. Additionally, recent shifts in the attitudinal climate in Switzerland indicate that these cognitive cultural models are not static but are subject to dynamic processes.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
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- Introduction
- Metapragmatic appositions in German talk-in-interaction
- How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
- The encoding of motion events in football and cycling live text commentary: A corpus linguistic analysis
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- Nonmanual downtoning in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language
- Cognitive cultural models at work: The case of German-speaking Switzerland
- Cognitive descriptions in a corpus-based dictionary of German paronyms
- A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German
- Idiomatic singleton or prototype? A productivity analysis of be-adj-and-v
- Networks of meanings: Complementing collostructional analysis by cluster and network analyses
- A frame-analysis of the interplay of grammar and cognition in emission verbs
- Bridging the gap: Toward a cognitive semantic analysis of the Lithuanian superlexical prefix be-
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Introduction
- Metapragmatic appositions in German talk-in-interaction
- How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
- The encoding of motion events in football and cycling live text commentary: A corpus linguistic analysis
- Can Macromania be explained linguistically? Beneath the morphological boundary: A sketch of subconscious manipulation strategies in Emmanuel Macron’s political discourses
- Nonmanual downtoning in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language
- Cognitive cultural models at work: The case of German-speaking Switzerland
- Cognitive descriptions in a corpus-based dictionary of German paronyms
- A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German
- Idiomatic singleton or prototype? A productivity analysis of be-adj-and-v
- Networks of meanings: Complementing collostructional analysis by cluster and network analyses
- A frame-analysis of the interplay of grammar and cognition in emission verbs
- Bridging the gap: Toward a cognitive semantic analysis of the Lithuanian superlexical prefix be-
