From ‘bad’ to ‘worse’: pragmatic scales and the (de)construction of cultural models

Abstract

This article uses a cognitive-pragmatic approach to discourse which is informed by two basic concepts: cultural models and pragmatic scales. The data consist of an essay by a literary writer, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, as well as editorials and letters to the editor published in a Luxembourgish newspaper. The analysis reveals how the authors of the editorials and letters to the editor both rely upon and construct a particular cultural model about education in Luxembourg, and how the literary writer deconstructs her readers’ (at least potentially stereotypical) model of tourism. Rather than attempt to distinguish between different text genres on such a basis, the article focuses on cognitive aspects that are common to all discourse processing; in particular, it highlights the key role played by pragmatic scales in linking and structuring cultural models. The scales are invoked primarily by evaluative adjective forms such as bad, worse, etc., and they make possible a high degree of linguistic implicitness in the writers’ rhetorical and argumentative strategies. The article concludes that the consequent processes of moving information across evaluative scales and filling in missing values are characteristic of the way human beings think, and that they work together with other processes of reasoning (such as conceptual blending) to produce the full complexity, but also the potentially stereotyped nature, of human thinking.