Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles | Chapters in Edited Collections | Popular Pieces
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Hart, C. and Winter, B. (2022). Gesture and legitimation in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage. Discourse & Society 33 (1): 34-55.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) increasingly recognises the role played by multiple semiotic modes in the discursive construction of social identities and inequalities. One embodied mode that has not been subject to any systematic analysis within CDA is gesture. An area where gesture has been extensively studied, and where it is shown to bear significant semiotic load in multimodal utterances, is in cognitive linguistics. Here, we use insights from cognitive linguistics to provide a detailed qualitative analysis of gestures in a specific discursive context – the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage. We describe the gestures that accompany a range of rhetorical tropes typical of anti-immigration discourses and critically analyse their role, alongside speech, in communicating prejudice and legitimating discriminatory action. Our analysis suggests that gesture is an important part of political discourse which is worthy of further investigation in future CDA research.
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Hart, C. and Mármol Queraltó, J. (2021). What can cognitive linguistics tell us about language-image relations? A multidimensional approach to intersemiotic convergence in multimodal texts. Cognitive Linguistics 32 (4): 529-562.
In contrast to symbol-manipulation approaches, Cognitive Linguistics offers a modal rather than an amodal account of meaning in language. From this perspective, the meanings attached to linguistic expressions, in the form of conceptualisations, have various properties in common with visual forms of representation. This makes Cognitive Linguistics a potentially useful framework for identifying and analysing language-image relations in multimodal texts. In this paper, we investigate language-image relations with a specific focus on intersemiotic convergence. Analogous with research on gesture, we extend the notion of co-text images and argue that images and language usages which are proximal to one another in a multimodal text can be expected to exhibit the same or consistent construals of the target scene. We outline some of the dimensions of conceptualisation along which intersemiotic convergence may be enacted in texts, including event-structure, viewpoint, distribution of attention and metaphor. We take as illustrative data photographs and their captions in online news texts covering a range of topics including immigration, political protests, and inter-state conflict. Our analysis suggests the utility of Cognitive Linguistics in allowing new potential sites of intersemiotic convergence to be identified and in proffering an account of language-image relations that is based in language cognition.
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Hart, C. (2021). Animals vs. armies: Resistance to extreme metaphors in anti-immigration discourse. Journal of Language and Politics 20(2): 226-253.
Within the emerging paradigm of experimental Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper investigates the framing effects of dehumanising vs militarising metaphors in anti-immigration discourses. These metaphors are characterised as ‘extreme metaphors’ in so far as they are manifestly metaphorical and obviously inflammatory. Attested examples of these metaphors in political and media discourses are identified and discussed before their potential framing effects are investigated experimentally. Contrary to predictions, alternative metaphors did not increase support for actions and evaluations consistent with the unique framings that they present. In fact, extreme metaphors decreased support for anti-immigration sentiments and hostile immigration policies compared to literal framings. It seems that extreme metaphors alert readers to the metaphorical framing being presented so that, among some groups of people, it is more readily scrutinised causing readers to reject the framing and adopt more sympathetic attitudes toward immigration. The implications of these findings for Critical Discourse Analysis are discussed.
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Hart, C. and Fuoli, M. (2020). Objectification outperforms subjectification in military interventionist discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 162: 17-28.
Politicians and other political speakers must engage in discursive work to construct themselves and the claims they offer as ‘reasons for action’ as credible. This is particularly the case when the action being proposed is high-stakes and/or when audiences are generally skeptical. The discursive means available to political speakers in this regard have been investigated in pragmatics, social psychology and critical discourse analysis. Broadly, two competing strategies can be identified: subjectification versus objectification . Both strategies function to elevate the epistemic status of the proposition advanced, thereby strengthening the justificatory case for action that it seeks to build. Subjectification strategies appeal to the personal authority of the speaker as a reason to believe the claim while objectification strategies appeal to third-party sources or other external evidentiary bases in support of the claim. In this study, we use experimental methods to compare empirically the effectiveness of these two alternative strategies. We do so in the context of political discourse seeking sanction for military action. Results show that, regardless of the credibility of the speaker, objectification strategies are more effective than subjectification strategies.
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Fuoli, M. and Hart, C. (2018). Trust-building strategies in corporate discourse: An experimental study. Discourse & Society 29 (5): 514-552.
This paper presents a scenario-based experiment designed to test the effects of trust-building strategies, realised in stance-taking acts, which a previous corpus-based study found to be salient features of stakeholder-facing corporate communication. The experiment relies on a between-subjects design in which a target group of subjects are exposed to trust-building strategies while another control group are not. We apply this paradigm to corporate discourse in the form of an About Us webpage produced by a fictitious multinational pharmaceutical company that has been accused by a whistleblower of corporate misconduct. The results of the study show that these strategies are indeed effective in fostering trust in the company and have an indirect positive effect on the perceived credibility of the company’s denial in response to the allegations made by the whistleblower. The strategies are therefore able to mitigate the potential damage caused by public accusations of wrongdoing and help companies insure against future threats to their legitimacy and freedom to operate, as when their behaviour violates, or is said to violate, societal norms and values. Theoretically, the results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms of trust-building and reader response. Methodologically, the study contributes to the growing body of work using experimental methods in CDA by further demonstrating that experimentation can usefully complement more traditional discourse-analytical methods as a form of triangulation.
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Hart, C. (2018). Event-frames affect blame assignment and perception of aggression: An experimental case study in CDA. Applied Linguistics 39 (3): 400-421.
While CDA is largely an interpretative exercise, it places an emphasis on ‘triangulation’ as a guiding methodological principle intended to help ground analyses and guard against purely subjective readings of texts. Missing from CDA, however, is triangulation incorporating experimental methodologies. In this paper, I argue that CDA in general can benefit from an experimental dimension and that Cognitive Linguistic approaches in particular lend themselves to extension into experimentalism. I demonstrate this by reporting a recent experiment carried out within a Cognitive Linguistic framework on the effects of regular transactive versus reciprocal verbs in news reports of political protests. Results of the experiment show that in the context of media discourse on political protests the presentation of these alternate constructions, as well as differences in information sequence, affect how people apportion blame and the level of aggression they perceive in social actors. The experiment thus not only provides evidence for the ideological effects of these particular linguistic differences but more generally goes some way to justifying CDA’s focus on micro-level lexico-grammatical features of texts.
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Hart, C. (2018). ‘Riots engulfed the city’: An experimental study investigating the legitimating effects of fire metaphors in discourses of disorder. Discourse & Society 29 (3): 279-298.
In Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS), metaphor is identified as a key index of ideology and an important device in the legitimation of social action. From this perspective, metaphor is a cognitive-semiotic operation, invoked by metaphorical expressions in discourse, in which a source frame is mobilised to provide a template for sense-making inside a target frame, leading to particular framing effects. However, the extent to which metaphors in discourse genuinely activate an alternative frame and thereby achieve framing effects has recently been subject to question. Amid calls for more empirical forms of analysis in Critical Discourse Studies, the paper reports two experiments testing the legitimating framing effects of fire metaphors in discourses of disorder. Results show that images of fire and fire metaphors in the absence of competing images facilitate support for police use of water cannon in response to social unrest. The study not only justifies attention to metaphor in CL-CDS but similar effects observed across semiotic modalities are interpreted as evidence in support of simulation-based theories of metaphor.
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Hart, C. (2017). Metaphor and intertextuality in media framings of the (1984-85) British miners’ strike: A multimodal analysis. Discourse & Communication 11 (1): 3-30.
The British Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 represents one of the most pivotal periods in British industrial relations. The significance of media stance towards the miners remains a controversial issue today, as attested by recent publications looking back at the strike (Williams, 2009a, 2014). Here, authors including miners, journalists and other commentators argue that media coverage of the strike followed a consistently anti-trade union agenda in which the media sought to destabilise the strike. An internal British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report, only recently made public, shows that the BBC themselves had concerns over possible imbalances in their coverage of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ (Harcup, 2014). Despite the weight attached to media coverage in this context, however, surprisingly little research has been conducted from a discourse-analytical perspective to show systematically and empirically how such an agenda may have been manifested across media texts. In this article, drawing on Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS), I show how one particular metaphorical framing of the strike, which construed the strike as a war between the State and the National Union of Mineworkers, persisted through the year-long period and consider the potential ideological functions of this framing in media strategies of (de)legitimation. I show how this metaphor featured in linguistic, visual and multimodal forms of media representation.
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Hart, C. (2016). The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for CDS: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods. Discourse & Society 27 (3): 335-350.
Two important challenges currently facing critical discourse studies (CDS) concern (i) the nature of language processing and (ii) the relation between linguistic and multimodal approaches. In this paper I seek to address both issues by advancing an integrated cognitive and multimodal approach to CDS to account for the communication of ideology in linguistic discourse. This approach is predicated on an argument from Cognitive Linguistics which suggests that understanding language involves the construction of multimodal mental representations, the properties of which can be approached within frameworks of multimodal social semiotics. Specifically, the paper shows how spatial organisation and orientation feature in our linguistic understanding of certain grammatical constructions and, consequently, what evaluative functions those constructions covertly confer. Traditionally, the direction of influence between linguistic and multimodal approaches to CDA is unidirectional with the former informing the latter but not the other way around. This paper represents a reversal of this orthodoxy.
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Hart, C. (2015). Viewpoint in linguistic discourse: Space and evaluation in news reports of political protests. Critical Discourse Studies 12 (3):238-260.
This paper continues to develop a program of research which has recently emerged investigating the ideological functions of spatial construals in social and political discourse from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective (Cap 2013; Chilton 2004; Dunmire 2011; Filardo Llamas 2013; Hart 2013a/b, 2014a; Kaal 2012). Specifically, inspired by principles in Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2008), the paper attempts to formulate a grammar of ‘point of view’ and show how this trans-modal cognitive system is manifested in the meanings of individual grammatical constructions which, when selected in discourse, yield mental representations whose spatial properties invite ideological evaluations. The link between spatial organisation and ideological evaluation in these mental models, it is argued, is a function of our embodied understanding of language. These theoretical arguments are illustrated with data taken from online news reports of two political protests.
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Oswald, S. and C. Hart (2014). Trust based on bias: Cognitive constraints on source-related fallacies. In D. Mohammed & M. Lewiński (eds.), Virtues of Argumentation. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Ontario
Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA). Windsor, ON: OSSA, pp. 1-13.
This paper advances a cognitive account of the rhetorical effectiveness of fallacious arguments and takes the example of source-related fallacies. Drawing on cognitive psychology and evolutionary linguistics, we claim that a fallacy enforces accessibility and epistemic cognitive constraints on argument processing targeted at preventing the addressee from spotting its fallaciousness, by managing to prevent or circumvent critical reactions. We address the evolutionary bases of biases and the way that these are exploited in fallacious argumentation.
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Hart, C. (2013). Event-construal in press reports of violence in political protests: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to CDA. Journal of Language and Politics 12 (3): 400-423.
In this paper I extend the scope of the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by incorporating Langacker’s model of Cognitive Grammar in a critical analysis of press reports of violence in two political protests. In doing so, I address issues recently raised against CDA concerning cognitive equivalence. The paper presents an analysis of the alternative conceptualisations of violence invoked in online reports from The Telegraph vs. The Guardian of two recent political protests. Systematic differences in construal are found across several parameters of conceptualisation, including schematization and various ‘focal adjustments’, which, it is suggested, represent potential sites of ideological reproduction.
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Hart, C. (2013). Argumentation meets adapted cognition: Manipulation in media discourse on immigration. Journal of Pragmatics 59: 200-209.
Critical discourse analysis has focussed extensively on argumentation in anti-immigration discourse where a specific suite of argumentation strategies has been identified as constitutive of the discourse. The successful perlocutionary effects of these arguments are analysed as products of pragmatic processes based on ‘common-sense’ reasoning schemes known as topoi. In this paper, I offer an alternative explanation grounded in cognitive-evolutionary psychology. Specifically, it is shown that a number of argumentation schemes identified as recurrent in anti-immigration discourse relate to two cognitive mechanisms proposed in evolutionary psychology: the cheater detection and avoidance mechanism (Cosmides 1989) and epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010). It is further suggested that the potential perlocutionary effects of argument acts in anti-immigration discourse, in achieving sanction for discriminatory practices, may arise not as the product of intentional-inferential processes but as a function of cognitive heuristics and biases provided by these mechanisms. The impact of such arguments may therefore be best characterised in terms of manipulation rather than persuasion.
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Hart, C. (2011). Force-interactive patterns in immigration discourse: A Cognitive Linguistic approach to CDA. Discourse & Society 22 (3): 269-286.
In the last few years a highly productive space has been created for Cognitive Linguistics inside Critical Discourse Analysis. So far, however, this space has been reserved almost exclusively for critical metaphor studies where Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory has provided the lens through which otherwise naturalised or opaque ideological patterns in text and conceptualisation can be detected. Yet Cognitive Linguistics consists of much more than Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Its efficacy for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) may therefore extend beyond critical metaphor studies. In this paper, I propose that Talmy’s (1988, 2000) theory of force-dynamics in particular represents a further, useful framework for the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to CDA. Using this analytical framework, then, I identify some of the indicators of, and demonstrate the ideological qualities of, force-dynamic conceptualisations in immigration discourse.
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Hart, C. (2011). Legitimising assertions and the logico-rhetorical module: Evidence and epistemic vigilance in media discourse on immigration. Discourse Studies 13 (6): 751-769.
Critical Discourse Analysis has recently begun to consider the implications of research in Evolutionary Psychology for political communication. At least three positions have been taken: (i) that this research requires Critical Discourse Analysis to re-examine and defend some of its foundational assumptions (Chilton 2005); (ii) that this research provides a useful explanatory framework for Critical Discourse Analysis in which questions can be addressed why might speakers pursue particular discursive strategies and why they might be so persuasive (Hart 2010); and (iii) that findings bare little or no relevance for Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak 2006). In this paper, I take up the first two of these positions and in doing so, of course, implicitly disagree with the third. I consider the positions in (i) and (ii), then, specifically in relation to Sperber’s (2000, 2001) notion of a ‘logico-rhetorical’ module. Taking the argument which Chilton makes concerning this module one stage further, I suggest that the logico-rhetorical module evolved as much for persuasion as it did for vigilance. I further suggest that the semantic category of evidentiality operationalised in media discourse is intended to satisfy the conditions of acceptance laid down by the logico-rhetorical module. I show how this semantic category therefore performs a legitimising function in media discourse on immigration.
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Hart, C. (2008). Critical discourse analysis and metaphor: Toward a theoretical framework. Critical Discourse Studies 5 (2): 91-106.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) explores the role of discourse structures in constituting social inequality. Metaphorical structure, however, has received relatively little attention in explicit CDA. The paper aims to redress this by developing a coherent theoretical framework for CDA and metaphor. This framework adopts conceptual blending theory over conceptual metaphor theory, where the latter is perceived to be incompatible with CDA. The framework is applied in a CDA of metaphors for nation and immigration in the British National Party’s 2005 general election manifesto.
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Chapters in Edited Collections
Hart, C. (2021). “28 Palestinians Die”: A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of Mystification in Press Coverage of State Violence on the Gaza Border. In M. Giovanelli, C. Harrison and L. Nuttall (eds.), New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style. London: Bloomsbury. pp.93-116.
Although developed originally to account for ‘traditional’ rank levels of linguistic structure, Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (CG) offers a particularly congenial framework to work with in various forms of text and discourse analysis. Indeed, while the primary method of linguistic analysis in stylistics and critical discourse analysis has typically been provided by systemic functional linguistics, there is now a rapidly growing body of work applying CG in both of these traditions. In this chapter, I apply a CG lens to an ideological effect much studied in critical discourse analysis, namely mystification. I take as data for a case study a convenience sample of media responses to recent (2018) instances of state violence and mass fatality on the Gaza-Israel border in which a number of Palestinian protesters were killed. I show how central notions within the architecture of CG, including action chaining, profiling and trajector-landmark alignments, might account for the mystificatory qualities, experienced in readers’ encounters with news texts, of certain textual features, including the use of intransitive verbs, agentless passive constructions and nominalisations.
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Hart, C. (in press). Cognitive Linguistic and experimental methods in Critical Discourse Studies. In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), The Cambrdige Handbook of Discourse Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.186-212.
Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is an approach to language study which (i) theorises the instrumentality of language in creating and sustaining power and inequality in social actions, identities and relations and which (ii) through detailed semiotic analysis, seeks to highlight (and resist) the latent ideological and persuasive properties of attested discourse practices in dominant social and political forms of communication. One recent approach to CDS is Cognitive Linguistic CDS (CL-CDS). CL-CDS places an emphasis on cognition as a necessary mediator in the constitutive relationship between texts and social action. In Cognitive Linguistics, meaning is viewed as a dynamic process of conceptualisation in which language connects with background knowledge and domain-general cognitive processes to yield a rich, modal rather than amodal, mental representation of the target scene. Drawing on frameworks in Cognitive Linguistics, then, CL-CDS seeks to model the conceptualisations invoked by specific language usages and consider the potential ideological/(de)legitimating functions of competing conceptualisations. In this chapter, I begin by introducing key principles of CL-CDS. I then go on to highlight some of the linguistic/conceptual phenomena that it has investigated. Finally, I consider some of the issues facing CL-CDS and the future directions it may take. One especially pertinent issue for CL-CDS is that the analyses offered of particular language usages and the conceptualisations they invoke remain only as hypotheses. Although cognitively plausible claims are made about text-reception, these are not actually empirically verified. A more recent development in CL-CDS, then, in line with Cognitive Linguistics more generally, is hypothesis testing using experimental methods. At the end of this chapter, I therefore point briefly to a small number of CL-CDS studies adopting experimental methods.
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Hart, C. (2019). Spatial properties of ACTION verb semantics: Experimental evidence for image schema orientation in transitive versus reciprocal verbs and its implications for ideology. In C. Hart (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics Approaches to Text and Discourse: From Poetics to Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp.181-204.
This chapter combines qualitative cognitive linguistic analysis based in Cognitive Grammar with experimental methods. Specifically, it investigates the ideological functions of transitive versus reciprocal verbs in news reports of violence at political protests. I begin by arguing that the actin schemas encoded by transitive versus reciprocal verbs are further construed from contrasting viewpoints. I then report an experiment in the form of a sentence-image matching task which verifies this hypothesis. Results of this experiment show that the actions encoded by transitive verbs are construed along the sagittal axis while the actions encoded by reciprocal verbs are construed along the transversal axis. Differences in information sequences within reciprocal verb constructions are further shown to result in alternative left-right configurations along the transversal axis. From here, I analyse the possible ideological significance of these relative spatial spatial orientations and values, drawing on theories of embodied valence, visual semiotics and conceptual metaphor theory. To show that viewpoint is a semiotically significant factor encoded in the meanings of transitive and reciprocal verbs, I report two further experiments which demonstrate convergence between ideological effects for viewpoint in both language usages and images which are, by the hypothesis, congruent.
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Hart, C. (2018). Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies. In J. Flowerdew and J.E. Richardson (eds.), Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge. pp.77-91.
One of the more recent developments on the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) landscape lies in critical applications of Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitive Linguistic approaches to CDA are characterised by a shift in focus to the interpretation-stage of analysis. That is, Cognitive Linguistic approaches address the cognitive-semiotic processes involved in understanding discourse and the fundamental role that these processes play in the construction of knowledge and the legitimation of action. Cognitive Linguistic approaches thus typically present detailed semantic analyses of language usages. In particular, Cognitive Linguistic approaches emphasise the conceptual nature of meaning construction and are concerned with modelling the conceptual structures and processes which, invoked by text in the course of discourse, constitute an ideologised understanding of the situations and events being described. Cognitive Linguistics itself is not a specific theory but a paradigm within linguistics comprised of several related theories. Accordingly, Cognitive Linguistics makes available to CDA a set of alternative ‘tools’ as different theories may be operationalised as analytical methodologies in critical studies of discourse. Theories in Cognitive Linguistics, however, share a common set of assumptions about the nature of language. These assumptions are naturally shared by Cognitive Linguistic studies in CDA and thus provide the common thread and theoretical backdrop that defines a more general Cognitive Linguistic school of CDA. Taking this approach, I provide an example analysis using data sourced from three online newspaper articles reporting on the 2014 Million Mask March in London.
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Hart, C. (2018). Metaphor and the (1984-5) Miners’ Strike: A multimodal analysis. In C. Hart and D. Kelsey (eds.), Discourses of Disorder: Riots, Strikes and Protests in the Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp.133-153.
Recent research in Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS) has shown that metaphor plays a significant role in structuring our understanding of social identities, actions and events. This research also demonstrates that metaphorical modes of understanding are not restricted in their articulation to language but find expression too in visual and multimodal genres of communication. In this chapter, I show how one metaphorical framing – STRIKE IS WAR – featured in multimodal media representations of the 1984-85 British Miners’ Strike. I analyse this metaphorical framing from a critical semiotic standpoint to argue that the conceptualisations invoked by these framing efforts served to ‘otherise’ the miners while simultaneously legitimating the actions during the strike of the Government and the police.
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Hart, C. (2017). Cognitive analysis in Critical Discourse Studies: Connecting language and image. In B. Forchtner and R. Wodak (eds.), Handbook of Language and Politics. London: Routledge. pp.187-201.
In this chapter, I introduce the Cognitive Linguistic Approach (CLA) to Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). This approach to CDS is characterised by an emphasis on the conceptual dimensions of semiosis. Specifically, it addresses the conceptualisations invoked by language and the ideological potential that those conceptualisations might realise in political contexts of communication. I begin the chapter by rehearsing some of the main theoretical commitments of this approach, focussing, principally, on the theory of language advanced in Cognitive Linguistics. I go on to demonstrate the analytical apparatus of this approach using selected examples from discourse on political protests. I then go on to make a connection between the CLA and Multimodal approaches to CDS. The claim to be made is that understanding language involves fully modal rather than amodal mental representations. I therefore argue that existing research on the social semiotics of multimodal representation is an important source in considering the meanings of language in use. I illustrate this claim relating linguistic instances of discourse on political protests to visual instances. Finally, I offer some conclusions and suggest some future directions for research within the CLA.
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Hart, C. (2015). Discourse. In E. Dabrowska and D. Divjek (eds.), Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 322-346.
In this chapter, I focus on discourse, understood as language in practice. I focus specifically on language in social and political practices to show how discourse can, through the patterns of conceptualisation it invokes, function ideologically. In doing so, I survey the most recent developments at the intersection between Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. This synergy represents both a ‘social’, or more specifically a ‘critical’, turn in Cognitive Linguistics as well as a ‘cognitive’ turn in Critical Discourse Analysis, which has traditionally adopted more social science based methodologies. Such has been the success of Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis, however, that this synergy now constitutes one of the most productive and pervasive methodological approaches to ideological research. Below, then, I only briefly state the case for and consider the consonance of this now well established alliance. The reciprocal benefits that collaboration between these two disciplines brings and the extent to which they make for (un)easy bedfellows has been carefully assessed by Stockwell (1999) and later recapitulated in several works (including Dirven et al. 2007; Hart 2010; Koller, 2014; Nuñez-Perucha 2011). The focus of this chapter will therefore be on the different Cognitive Linguistic tools which have been developed and deployed in Critical Discourse Analysis over the last decade. Rather than chronologically chart the development of this field, however, I offer an overview of the landscape from a contemporary vantage point which brings together several analytical apparatus inside a single, integrated framework.
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Hart, C. (2014). Construal operations in online press reports of political protests. In C. Hart and P. Cap (eds.), Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 167-188.
One of the most successful new ‘schools’ or ‘approaches’ in CDS is represented by a body of work applying insights from Cognitive Linguistics (Chilton 2004; Dirven, Frank and Putz 2003; Hart 2010, 2011a; Hart and Lukeš 2007). This body of work includes but is not limited to Critical Metaphor Analysis (e.g. Charteris-Black 2004; Koller 2004; Musolff 2004). At the theoretical core of this ‘Cognitive Linguistic Approach’ (CLA) are the notions of conceptualisation and construal. Conceptualisation is the dynamic cognitive process involved in meaning-making as discourse unfolds. This process entails language connecting with background knowledge and global cognitive abilities to yield local mental representations. To the extent that the CLA focuses on the relation between discourse and conceptualisation, it addresses the cognitive import of (ideologically imbued) linguistic representations (cf. Stubbs 1997: 106). Construal refers to the different ways in which a given scene, guided by language, can be conceptualised. Alternative ‘construal operations’ are reliant on different cross-domain cognitive systems and realise different (ideological) discursive strategies. In this chapter, I discuss some of the specific construal operations which, invoked in the audience, are the locus proper of ideological reproduction in discourse. I do so in the context of two contrasting online news texts reporting on the G20 protests in London, 2009.
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Hart, C. (2013). Constructing contexts through grammar: Cognitive models and conceptualisation in British Newspaper reports of political protests. In J. Flowerdew (ed.), Discourse and Contexts. London: Continuum. pp. 159-184.
In this chapter, I analyse, from the perspective of the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to CDA, representations of political protests in British newspapers and the cognitive models that these representations reflect and (re)construct in the minds of readers. The analysis focuses on the alternative image schemas which are available to construe protest events and how patterns of construal might index wider ideological discourses. A comparative analysis is undertaken of online press reports of violence in the UK student fees protests on the 10 and 24 of November 2010.
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Hart, C. (2011). Moving beyond metaphor in the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to CDA: Construal operations in immigration discourse. In C. Hart (ed.), Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 171-192.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Cognitive Linguistics were established at around the same time with the publications of Language and Control (Fowler et al. 1979) and Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). They developed in quite different academic contexts, though, and until relatively recently did not come into contact. In the last few years, however, a highly productive space has been created for Cognitive Linguistics inside CDA (Charteris-Black 2004, 2006a/b; Koller 2004, 2005; Musolff 2004, 2006). So far, this space has been reserved almost exclusively for Critical Metaphor Analysis where Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory has provided the lens through which otherwise naturalised or opaque ideological patterns could be detected in language and thought. But Cognitive Linguistics, like CDA, is not a single discipline. It is, rather, a perspective on a range of linguistic phenomena. Its potential efficacy for CDA may therefore extend beyond Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight (i) the place of Cognitive Linguistics in CDA and (ii) that Cognitive Linguistics can be incorporated into CDA to disclose various ideological dimensions of text and conceptualisation including but without being limited to metaphor.
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Hart, C. (2008). Critical discourse analysis and conceptualisation: Mental spaces, blended spaces and discourse spaces in the British National Party. In C. Hart and D. Lukes (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: Application and Theory. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 107-31.
Popular Pieces
Hart, C. (2017). The miners’ strike and a warmongering media. In G. Williams (ed). The Flame Still Burns: The Creative Power of Coal. Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.
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Hart, C. (2016). War on the picket line: How the British press made a battle out of the miners’ strike. The Conversation.
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