Cognitive and Social Discourse: Constructing Discourse and Producing Social Meaning

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze a specific cognitive and social discourse from a discourse semiotics perspective. The material comes from the book "Possible Morocco". While the book is replete with statistics and chronological indices, it contains many components that create a discourse (including tense and spatial structure, agents, and mechanisms of persuasion, and techniques for building the effect of truth). These discourse components are described and analyzed in order to trace how social meaning is developed.