Publications

Publication details [#4147]

Dirven, René, Frank Polzenhagen and Hans-Georg Wolf. 2007. Cognitive Linguistics, ideology, and Critical Discourse Analysis (Ch. 47). In Geeraerts, Dirk and Hubert Cuyckens. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press . pp. 1222–1240. 19 pp.

Abstract

Critical Discourse Analysis is a highly heterogeneous research program. Its dominant linguistic approach has its footing in Functional Grammar, in particular Systemic-Functional Grammar as developed by Halliday (1985), who himself has made major contributions to the field. Yet there is also a cognitive strand, notably through the work of van Dijk (e.g., 1997, 1998), and there is a strong discussion on further interdisciplinarity (e.g., Wodak and Chilton 2005) and on further methodological and theoretical pluralism, including an opening toward Cognitive Linguistics (e.g., Chilton 2005; O'Halloran 2003). Given the diversity and vastness of the field, the label ''critical linguistics'' has been introduced, which also comprises approaches such as feminist linguistics and ecolinguistics. It is the particular strength of Cognitive Linguistics that it allows for and aims at an analysis of ideology on both the unconscious and the conscious levels. What both levels share is the notion of perspective. Cognitive Linguistics thus relates ''ideology in language'' to conceptual and linguistic phenomena that establish specific, though often unconscious, perspectives on the world, be it in the broad or in the narrow sense of ideology, or predispose speakers to such perspectives. This double layer of unconscious and conscious ideologization will determine the structure of this chapter, in addition to the distinctions to be made in the tools of analysis. The first cognitive linguistic analyses all remain within the narrower framework of metaphor research à la Lakoff and Johnson (1980), but gradually further and more powerful conceptual tools are developed. Phenomena that establish potentially ideological perspectives are traced on different levels of linguistic description. Section 2 outlines the ideological dimension of metaphor, with the emphasis on covert ideology in the discourse domain of economics. Section 3 ''explores grammatical means that reflect deep-rooted unconscious norms within a sociocultural group.] Section 5, finally, discusses the pervasiveness of metaphor and the role of cultural models in the highly abstract domain of science and addresses their more often than not ideological orientation, more specifically in the metalanguage of biological and linguistic discourse. (René Dirven, Frank Polzenhagen and Hans-Georg Wolf)