Cognición y percepción en el análisis del sentido de los discursos para la interpretación consecutiva

Abstract

What does 'interpreting the sense of a discourse' mean? In the present paper, a model of textual analysis, based on principles of human perception and cognition, is described in order to explain the various senses implied in a discourse. The origin of the theoretical and methodological framework derives from Hulst's functional model for translation oriented text analysis (1995), but we have modified the model to some extent for the benefit of interpreting teaching. Our model proposes a taxonomy of senses that takes into account the interrelation between textual macrostructure and the ideas/senses expressed by the speaker (informativity). The taxonomy is described according to some theoretical aspects of cognitive linguistics and functional textology because both disciplines shed light on the way human beings perceive, imagine, argue and structure reality and, more specifically, the topic of an oral discourse. We distinguish two basic categories of ideas or senses: a) ideas based on elements of content and b) ideas pertaining to the communicative situation. The first category is specifically related with the proper textual information or content from a cognitive point of view. The second one is related with ideas just providing interactional support to the discourse, the so-called 'metacommunicative elements' such as titles or introductory remarks. The model - due to its optimal metalanguage-is useful for consecutive interpreting beginners because it improves students' cognition concerning the sense and structure of oral discourses and it contributes to improve students' metacognition as well.