Analysis of Cognitive Structuration in Context of Verbal Productivity

The paper presents an interdisciplinary connection between psychology and linguistics. We analyze ways of cognitive structuration of verbal information with the help of cognitive style ‘category width‘. Verbal productivity is being examined in the selection of politeness factors in requesting speech acts in foreign language and mother tongue depending on the presence of social distance and dominance. The results have shown that’category width’ is manifested to a greater extent according to selected social factors in situations where social distance is present. It is remarkable that individual factors are more frequently used in foreign languages than in the mother tongue.