2016 Volume 6 Issue 1 Pages 45-65
This paper will argue that cognitive semantic world is formed through an accumulation of what people perceive, cognize, and conceptualize in their daily lives. Things in cognitive semantic world are identified and stored as both linguistic symbol for mental representations and discourse in social practice. Each person develops his or her own structured cognitive semantic world based on personal experiences. Therefore, one individual’s cognitive semantic world will not be identical to that of another’s. This paper will examine how media coverage since the March 11, 2011 Japan earthquake can be evaluated as reflecting cognitive semantic world. Corpus analysis as a quantitative approach will be used to extract target words, and discourse analysis as a qualitative approach will be applied to explore the structure of the discourse containing the target words. Articulation theory will be employed in order to focus on how social, cultural, political and economic meanings are discursively generated, and how they can affect physical objects and social events that shape the real world. Finally, it will be claimed that our society is heavily influenced by social practices and discourse.
