Chapter Two
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as voice-shifting (active vs. passive) and nominalizations, which are
prominent features of the corpus under investigation. The present study
starts from the Cognitive Linguistics’ premise that “language is a way of
organizing knowledge that reflects the needs, interests, and experiences of
individuals and cultures” (Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007: 5), and is based
on the well-known experiential and prominence view on linguistic
structures (Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 2f.) developed within the cognitive
framework. We briefly summarize the meaning of these concepts, which is
useful for better understanding the corpus analysis in Section 4.
The experiential view (Lakoff 1982; Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 2f.)
implies that human understanding is determined by embodiment and
experiences: words are associated with experiences, which are part of the
meaning. Depending on the context words evoke specific associations,
which, in turn, depend on stored cognitive models. This view provides the
basis for concepts such as idealized cognitive models (Lakoff 1987),
which we will use in the analysis below. The prominence view accounts
for information selection and configuration, which can be explained by the
Figure/Ground principle as elaborated by Langacker (1990, 1991). This
concept allows for analyzing in greater detail the different construals in
SmPCs as compared to PILs. At the same time, it provides further insight
into the perspectives from which the situations and events described in the
corpus are represented. Hereby, the concept of the perspectival nature of
linguistic meaning is particularly important: We assume that language has
a categorizing function, which implies that the language use in SmPCs and
PILs mirrors the respective conceptualizer’s perception (i.e. the experts’
vs. non-experts’ perspective) rather than reflecting some objective reality.
In the remainder of this chapter, we shall apply and further elaborate the
framework sketched above in a more detailed analysis of selected
fragments of the specialized vs. popularized medico-pharmaceutical
discourse as exemplified by SmPCs and PILs.
Corpus analysis
Context, cognitive models and frames
In approaching the discourse of SmPCs and PILs from an experiential
viewpoint we assume that the language in both text types—regardless of
the register—intrinsically is linked with human (bodily) experiences and
the respective reader’s perception of reality, which fundamentally
influences the way how this reality is conceptualized. We may assume that
medical terms as well as their equivalents in general language trigger