Regular selves constructed through genres: A socio-cognitive approach to the study of positioning acts in Italian rectors’ inaugural speeches

Abstract

This study aims to provide a socio-cognitive approach to understand how the identity associated with a social category is constructed through regular positioning acts in conventionalized genres. Using genre-based positioning analysis, we analyzed a corpus of 30 Italian rectors’ inaugural speeches and identified six rhetorical moves regularly used in the genre, which revealed three underlying positionings – representative of the university, value disseminator, and advocate – associated with the social role of university rectors in the Italian higher education context. Drawing on the Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model (hereafter ECModel), we analyzed how these positionings are conventionalized through shared conformity profiles of the genre in the onomasiological, semasiological, syntagmatic, and contextual dimensions. This study implies that genres can be important mediums through which the cognitive entrenchment and social conventionalization of positionings contribute to constructing our regular selves to be performed in the social domain.