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Article published In: Cognitive Perspectives on Genre
Edited by Carla Vergaro
[Pragmatics & Cognition 25:3] 2018
► pp. 430–458

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A cognitive framework for understanding genre

The Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model

 | University of Perugia
Published online: 10 January 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19003.ver
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to apply the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (EC-Model hereafter; see Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2014. Lexico-grammatical patterns, pragmatic associations and discourse frequency. In Thomas Herbst, Hans-Jörg Schmid & Susen Faulhaber (eds.), Constructions – collocations – patterns, 239–293. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2015. A blueprint of the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 31. 1–27. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2016. Why cognitive linguistic must embrace the pragmatic and social dimensions of language and how it could do so more seriously. Cognitive Linguistics 27(4). 543–557. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2017. A framework for understanding entrenchment and its psychological foundations. In Hans-Jörg Schmid (ed.), Entrenchment and the psychology of language learning: How we reorganize and adapt linguistic knowledge, 9–36. Boston: APA and Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2018. Ein integratives soziokognitives Modell des dynamischen Lexikons. In Stefan Engelberg, Henning Lobin, Kathryn Steyer & Sascha Wolfer (eds.), Wortschätze: Dynamik, Muster, Komplexität, 215–231. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Schmid, Hans-Jörg & Annette Mantlik. 2015. Entrenchment in historical corpora? Reconstructing dead authors’ minds from their usage profiles. Anglia 133(4). 583–623. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) of language knowledge to genre, with the aim of showing how a unified theory of the relation between usage and linguistic knowledge and convention can shed light on the way genre knowledge becomes entrenched in the individual and shared conventional behavior in communities. The EC-Model is a usage-based and emergentist model of language knowledge and convention rooted in cognitive linguistics and usage-based approaches. It sees knowledge as emerging from language usage, and explains the processes underlying the intertwining of social practice and cognition. However, so far, no suggestion has been advanced on how to extend the model to account for entrenchment and conventionalization at the supra-sentential level. In the area of genre studies various attempts have been made by scholars to develop or apply theories belonging to different scientific domains to understand the nature of genre. However, so far, there has been no research that applies a unified model in the attempt to link entrenchment of genres in individuals to their conventionalization at the societal level. I largely focus on the long tradition of rhetorical studies of genre, one among the different approaches that, over time, have regarded genre as their main topic of investigation. I concentrate on this tradition as it opens up the entire field of enquiry that defines contemporary genre research. To these I add by showing how the explanations provided so far can be cognitively clarified and unified under the EC-Model. The paper, then, argues that the EC-Model is theoretically apt to address questions about the nature of genre, capturing in an elegant way the interplay between cognition and social interaction in genre emergence, evolution, stabilization and variation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Converging lines in genre studies and cognitive linguistics
  • 3.The EC-Model
  • 4.Looking at genre through the lens of the EC-Model
    • 4.1Emergence, persistence, variation, and change
      • 4.1.1The sermon and the blog
    • 4.2Contextualized generic forms
      • 4.2.1Combination of blessing–cursing speech acts in the Puritan sermon
      • 4.2.2Concessivity in business letter discourse
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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