G. Ignatow – Identifying Mental Models in Discourses
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Identifying Mental Models in Discourses: Schemas, Sequences, and Metaphors
Recent papers in cultural studies and cultural sociology mark a return to questions of meaning.
After several decades in which issues of meaning were backgrounded in favor of post-structuralist
theories of action and practices, meaning is today making something of a comeback. Sociologists are
increasingly interested in how systems of symbols become meaningful for individuals and groups.
Compared to earlier, structuralist cultural theory, though, recent work is more concerned with how
meaning is created and transformed in group settings (Eliasoph and Lichterman, 2003) and in institutional
fields (Mohr and Duquenne, 1997). Also new is an integration of quantitative methods into cultural
analysis (Martin, 2002; Mohr, 1998; Mohr and Duquenne, 1997). This paper attempts to contribute to this
movement in cultural analysis by developing a method for measuring ‘meaning structures’ in discourses.
Specifically, I attempt to identify mental models or schemas in naturally occurring language.
Mental models consist of small numbers of conceptual objects and their relations to each other
(D’Andrade, 1987). These models shape reasoning and language (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). In the
cognitive sciences, mental models are thought to take one of two forms: proposition schemas, which
specify concepts and the relations which hold among them (D’Andrade, 1987), and image schemas,
which are conventional mental images acquired largely unconsciously and automatically over the years
by members of a cultural community (Lakoff, 1987: 220). In this paper, I use the terms mental model and
schema in reference to image schemas (see DiMaggio, 2002).
This paper develops a method of identifying schemas in natural language. The method developed
is based on research on 1) semantic sequences, and 2) metaphor.
Semantic sequences. Cultural sociological research on semantic sequences by Cerulo (1998) and
Franzosi (1989, 1994) provides a useful method by which to begin to identify schemas in discourses. For
Franzosi (1994: 107), a “semantic grammar” captures the deep representation of a text similar to the way
Convention