THE CATEGORY OF CONSEQUENCE IN GERMAN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DISCOURSE FROM THE POSITION OF A COGNITIVE APPROACH

Abstract

The article studies a concept of consequence in German scientific and technical discourse. The study is based on complex sentences with consequential clauses, selected from original German professional (railway) journals. The main aim of the research is to show how mental images are represented in linguistic structures. A cognitive approach plays a key role, allowing us to study the mechanisms of conceptualizing cause-and-effect relationships in German and helping to explain the choice of a particular syntactic model depending on the native speaker’s communicative situation and the type of discourse. The primary research method utilizes cognitive-pragmatic situational modeling, which identifies and systematizes cognitive-pragmatic situations expressed in complex sentences with subordinate clauses of consequence. The factuality / hypotheticality factor allows to differentiate between types of cognitive-pragmatic situations such as actual consequence, possible outcome, and expected outcome.