The Sociosemiotic Commitment: New Challenges and Perspectives for Cognitive Linguistics

This article explores the discrepancies between cognitive and sociocultural perspectives within Cognitive Linguistics, focusing on Dirk Geeraerts's presentation of the Sociosemiotic Commitment. It highlights the challenges in reconciling these two frameworks, particularly the discrepancies in their theoretical views of language and the concept of meaning. The article places particular emphasis on the cultural models of language standardization, providing a critical analysis of the rationalistic and romantic models, and introducing the disciplinary model that historically precedes both. The findings demonstrate that the concept of a standard language is irrelevant for indigenous languages and does not emerge with the advent of writing; rather, it arises in early modern states and is linked to specific normative ideological demands that govern the aesthetics of classicism at large. From the cognitive perspective, this concept can be replaced by the notion of the verbal channel within multimodal communication.