Discourse of Drug Information for Experts and Patients
33associations that are part of the language user’s experience. Both the
context and the hearers’/ readers’ cognitive models (Lakoff 1987)
determine which associations will be evoked. From a cognitive-linguistic
viewpoint context is the “mental conceptualization” evoked by linguistic
units referring to some depicted situation,^11 i.e. real world objects and the
cognitive representation of the interaction between these cognitive
categories or concepts (see also Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 47).
Contexts are the basis for cognitive models, which are interrelated in
some way or another in order to form conceptual networks. For the
purpose of our analysis we will use the term cognitive model as equivalent
of frame in accordance with the cognitive re-interpretation of the notion as
“the knowledge of which is presupposed for the concepts encoded by the
words” (Fillmore and Atkins 1992: 75). The model refers to all contexts
(experienced and stored), which are associated by an individual (expert
and layperson) for a particular knowledge domain (in the case at hand: the
medico-pharmaceutical domain). Cognitive models are basically culture-
dependent and influenced by cultural models, certainly in domains such as
medicine (e.g. the Western deductive vs. the Eastern inductive approach to
medicine). The cognitive models involved in our investigation differ more
specifically in terms of the knowledge evoked by the different discourse
types under investigation: the proper understanding of the specialized
discourse of SmPCs presumes an expert model based on scientific facts,
whereas PILs start from a ‘naive’ layperson’s model of drugs, their effects
and risks based on informal everyday knowledge. In this sense cognitive
models also are cultural models as they are shared by all members of a
social group (in the given case: medical experts vs. patients).
It should be mentioned that in view of the open-endedness of cognitive
models their description is inherently selective (Ungerer and Schmid 2006:
49). As cognitive models are mental and psychological views of individual
knowledge and experiences, their description is also necessarily idealized
and based on assumptions. It is, however, a fact that cognitive models are
ubiquitous, which implies that any categorization starts from some
cognitive model(s). If, for example, scientific drug information, which is
(^11) This definition differs from pragmatic and sociolinguistic definitions of context,
in which the focus is on the speech event in which utterances are made. In contrast
to ‘context’ the term ‘situation’ stands for the interaction of objects and refers to
some state of affairs in the real world (Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 48).The term
‘scene’, which has been introduced by Fillmore (1975: 124) together with the
notions of ‘frame’ and ‘scenario’, is closely related to ‘situation’ in the sense that
scenes also refer to objective perceivable phenomena., i.e. the interaction between
objects (see also Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 48).