Cognitive Style as the Basis for Algorithmization of Verbal and Cognitive Activity in Academic Discourse

Abstract

The article specifies and analyzes the basic characteristics of the cognitive style in generative and interpretive activities of participants within the framework of academic discourse. The cognitive style itself can be defined as a dynamic “scheme of action” that facilitates the structuring of the communicative process. The algorithm for creating and translating the results of discursivization in scientific communication contains a flexible sequence of cognitive and verbal actions to solve problems determined by situational and contextual conditions. As a result of discourse, modus and conversational analysis, the authors determine the illocutionary readiness of producers for generation and verbalization, and recipients for apperception and interpretation of “anchor” concepts as cognitive style markers and elements of structuring cognitive and communicative activity. The empirical material was microcontexts from the collective monograph “Introduction to the Synergetics of Translation”, containing both markers of the generation of cognitive components and their translation and conventionalization. An analysis of cognitive styles that are combined in academic discourse into a synergistic unity, a cognitive strategy, revealed the dominance of the right-handed characteristics of the Myers-Briggs type indicator: analyticism, field independence, focusing flexibility, reflectivity, and detailing. Compliance with the identified criteria involves the use of soft patterns as components of dynamic “schemes of action”, which leads to the flexibility of algorithms and modification of the sequence of acts of cognition and verbalization. The authors conclude that the potential acceptability of the cognitive styles of various participants in academic communication and the adaptive possibilities of style characteristics make it possible to create a cognitive strategy as a general direction of generative- and interpretative activity. The apperceptive type of cognitive activity, the “anchoring” of individual concepts in the space of scientific reception, the possibility of delayed harmonization of cognitive styles in the “downtime” situation are the conditions for identifying correspondences of the academic discourse macroproposition in the text.

Keywords

• academic discourse
• cognitive style
• cognitive strategies
• soft patterns
• verbalization / interpretation algorithmization
• downtime situation
• non-sensory epistemological metaprogram