Dyskursy o Kulturze (Jun 2019)
Empirical Insights in Methodological Integration of Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics: A View from Political Discourse Study
Abstract
Much of today’s CDA is taking a ‘cognitive turn’, drawing upon advances in cognitive science and incorporating vast amounts of work on spatial-temporal cognition and conceptualization into various interdisciplinary studies of ideologically motivated construals of meaning within different discourse domains. The cognitive-linguistic approach to CDA provides a disciplined theoretical account of the conceptual import of linguistic choices identified as potentially ideological and affords an excellent lens on persuasive, manipulative and coercive properties of discourse, worldview and conceptualization which have hitherto been beyond the radar of CDA. In the first part of the paper I review the cognitive models and the models of spatial cognition in particular which have been making the most significant contribution to CDA. Discussing Levinson’s spatial frames of reference, Text World Theory, and Deictic Space Theory), among others, I describe the input of cognitive-linguistic research in the account of the basic deictic architecture of the Discourse Space (DS). I particularly acknowledge the role of that research in elucidating the DS center-periphery arrangement underpinning ideological and value-based positions in discourse. At the same time, however, I argue that cognitive models reveal further theoretical potential which has not yet been exploited. As of today, the cognitive contribution to CDA involves primarily issues of mental processing and conceptual organization. It thus focuses on how people establish representations and ideologically charged worldviews, rather than explaining how they are made to establish a worldview, in the service of speaker’s goals. In response to this deficit, the second part of the paper outlines Proximization Theory (PT), showing its application to a state interventionist discourse (the US anti-terrorist discourse) and, potentially, to other important discourses of the public sphere. Proximization is a discursive strategy of crisis and conflict construction in the dynamic Discourse Space (DS). It consists in presenting physically and temporally distant events and states of affairs (including ‘distant’ and therefore adversarial ideologies) as increasingly and negatively consequential to the speaker and the addressee positioned in the deictic center of the DS. Projecting the distant entities as gradually encroaching upon the center, the speaker seeks legitimization of actions aimed to neutralize the growing impact of the negative, ‘foreign’, ‘alien’, ‘antagonistic’, entities. Thus, Proximization Theory has its lens on not only the bipolar static location of the center-periphery entities, but also on the discursive construal of movement from the periphery to the center. Unlike the other models, it fully captures the complex ideological positioning in political/public discourse and, crucially, the dynamics of conflict between the opposing ideologies of the DS entities.
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