In this book, I have sought to provide an up to date and comprehensive statement on the theory and practice of Cognitive CDA. Cognitive CDA, as I have described it here, is a form of applied cognitive linguistics that draws upon models and methods in cognitive linguistics to critically analyse conceptualisations evoked in political discourse. By critical analysis I mean a contextually sensitive assessment of the ideological and legitimating potentials of conceptualisations which, from a particular normative position, can be considered problematic. In line with the broader aims of CDA, it is hoped that with an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved in political persuasion and legitimation comes a greater capacity for resistance. I have been careful, however, not to assume that resistance to hegemonic discourses is only possible with the intervention of CDA and we have seen throughout the book examples of readers actively resisting the implications of texts and the kind of meta-linguistic awareness on which such resistance is built.
A key claim of cognitive linguistics is that the cognitive processes involved in language are manifestations of cognitive processes found to function in other areas of cognitive experience like memory, perception, imagination and reason. Consequences of such a view are (i) that the meanings evoked by linguistic expressions are necessarily conceptual in nature and (ii) that the use of one expression over another in the description of events invites a particular construal, which may be ideologically invested. The first part of the book has been structured around specific dimensions of construal taking in schematisation, attentional distribution, viewpoint and metaphor. Across a range of case studies, we have seen how these dimensions of construal figure in political discourse to engender ideologised conceptions of social actors, institutions and events. Through schematisation, textual choices impose image-schematic representations on the entities and events they describe which define their domain-instantiation and internal structure. We encountered schematisation in connection with the motion event in immigration discourse and in connection with action, force and motion schemas in discourses of political protest, focussing specifically on media coverage of a Black Lives Matter event. Textual choices also necessarily serve to differentially distribute attention over particular facets of the event-structure under apprehension. The result is diminished attention to the role of certain actors in the event or to the effect of the actions involved on other actors. We encountered attentional distribution in connection with immigration, where patterns of textual representation neglect the causes or motives of immigration, and in connection with discourses of state-sanctioned conflict, with a focus on violence along the Gaza border, where certain grammatical choices mystify responsibility for and mitigate the impact of violent, including fatal, actions. The conceptualisation of events is further inherently viewpointed. Readers are invited by linguistic expressions to assume spatial, temporal and modal perspectives with respect to the scenes and events conceived in the course of discourse. We encountered viewpoint in connection with media discourses of political protest, official discourses of Covid-19, discourses of immigration and the discourse of the far-right political organisation Britain First. Finally, metaphoric linguistic expressions invite readers to construe situations and events through the lens of an alternative frame with consequences for how we think, feel and act within the target frame. We encountered metaphor in connection with discourses of immigration, Brexit and Covid-19 and argued that these discourses are not entirely disconnected but related to one another within a metaphor matrix by virtue of all being conceived in terms of war. The analyses presented showed that intertextual and interdiscursive references serve as subtle but significant enactors of metaphorical construals.
Although the issues addressed in the book are global and of international consequence, including immigration, Brexit and Covid-19, such issues were addressed largely in the contexts of British politics and the British media. The book is therefore as much a reflection on the state of British politics and media as it is a statement on the principles of Cognitive CDA. Cognitive CDA, of course, is not specifically designed with any one context in mind and it is my hope that other scholars will take up the tools of Cognitive CDA and apply them to other issues in other political contexts, expanding and adapting the toolkit as required.
A major aim of the book has been to incorporate multimodality within Cognitive CDA. A significant advantage of cognitive linguistics is that it is able to account for meaning-making processes across the range of semiotic modes through which political discourse is performed, all within a single unified theoretical framework. Cognitive CDA is already inherently multimodal in one respect. The conceptualisations evoked by linguistic expressions are themselves multimodal, possessing properties normally associated with visual perception and other aspects of cognitive experience. This makes Cognitive CDA ‘multimodal ready’ in a second respect. Since many of the meaning-making processes ascribed to language have a basis in multimodal experience, multimodal semiotic experience is easily accommodated within the analytical frameworks of Cognitive CDA. This makes possible not only a consideration of discourses as they are expressed in semiotic modes besides language but also a consideration of how language and other semiotic modes interact with respect to specific meaning-making parameters within a single multimodal text. This was the approach taken in connection with co-text images and co-speech gestures in Chapters 7 and 8 respectively. Of course, it is not the case that multimodality has hitherto been absent in Cognitive CDA. For example, visual and multimodal incarnations of conceptual metaphors have been identified and analysed across a range of political discourses. However, this book advances multimodal research in Cognitive CDA in two important ways. Firstly, it goes beyond metaphor to show how other dimensions of construal, including schematisation, attention and viewpoint, are indexed multimodally. We saw this specifically in connection with news photographs and their captions where it was shown how language and image in this sub-genre of news discourse display intersemiotic convergence with respect to multiple dimensions of construal. Secondly, it extends multimodality in Cognitive CDA beyond images to investigate the role of co-speech gesture in political communication. In the final chapter of the book (Chapter 8), we saw how speech and gesture work together to co-construct meaning and how gesture features in the performative style of right-wing populism. The continued exploration of multimodality in my view represents one of the most exciting future directions for Cognitive CDA.
Throughout the book, I have tried as much as possible to draw on evidence from experimental studies which empirically demonstrate the power that language and other semiotic modes have to influence attitudes and opinions and to legitimate otherwise controversial actions. Continuing to develop experimental methods in Cognitive CDA to investigate further semiotic features in more discursive contexts represents another exciting direction for future research.
The last decade has been defined by the rise of right-wing populism, manifesting in Britian in hostile immigration policies, restrictions on the right to protest and Brexit. At the point of publication, the UK government continues to ramp up its populist rhetoric around immigration with the Home Secretary extending the extreme metaphor immigration is natural disaster to warn of a coming ‘hurricane’ of mass migration. In the USA, the prospect of Donald Trump returning to presidential office is more than an outside possibility. However, there are signs that the wave of right-wing populism that has swept across Europe and the USA may be abating. In Poland, the right-wing populist and national-conservative Law and Justice Party have been defeated in a general election. A general election is also imminent in the UK, which the current populist incarnation of the conservative party look set to lose. Whether a change in government transpires and if it does whether it brings serious changes to social, economic and environmental policy remains to be seen. Radical change, however, seems sadly unlikely.
