Tra corpo e società: la nozione di habitus linguistico di Pierre Bourdieu e le sue dimensioni cognitive

Abstract

Cognitive sociolinguistics evaluates the influence of socialisation on cognitive operations that underlie the acquisition, the functioning and the use of a language system. Looking at language, as a human faculty, we are prompted to investigate the relation between the invariant elements, that we define natural, on one side, and the historical and social variations, on the other. Within a perspective that interprets cognitive operations as socially and historically determined, Bourdieu's notion of linguistic habitus may be a way of interpreting the link between human nature, society and language in terms of embodiment of social structures in the subject's cognitive patterns. This notion of linguistic habitus may play a significant heuristic role in cognitive sociolinguistics, especially in hypothesising a particular functioning mode of linguistics competence with respect to the linguistic systems and their inherent variations. Using the notion of habitus allows us to integrate the crucial attempts of cognitive sociolinguistic analysis and to include analysis of linguistic usage in a broader epistemological framework which combines different disciplines in order to become a form of linguistic ethology