Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives

Description

Researchers in critical discourse analysis (CDA) have often pointed to grammar as a locus of ideology in discourse. This book illustrates the role that grammars as models of language (and image) can play in revealing ideological properties of texts and discourse in social and political contexts. The book takes the reader through three distinct grammatical frameworks - functional grammar, multimodal grammar and cognitive grammar. Using examples taken from a range of discourses relating to globalisation, including discourses of immigration, war, corporate practice and political protests, the book demonstrates the individual utility and the interconnectedness of these models inside CDA. A key argument advanced is that the cognitive processes necessarily involved in making sense of language are based in visual experience. This position offers new ways of understanding the ideological effects of grammatical choices in texts and suggests a reassessment of the relationship between linguistic and multimodal grammars in CDA. The book will appeal to students and researchers interested in CDA and the relationship between discourse, cognition and social action.

Christopher Hart is Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics and Discourse, Lancaster University, UK

This book is an ambitious attempt to re-examine CDA so as to present a CDA from functional and cognitive perspectives. ... [It] contributes to CDA both theoretically and methodologically in the way that it can help the development of CDA from a linguistic, multimodal, functional and cognitive perspective. In addition, it is impressive for its application of SFG, Appraisal Theory, Multimodality Theory and Cognitive Grammar to detailed analysis of the underlying ideology in the data selected from various social and political contexts. * Critical Discourse Studies * The innovative syntheses, lucid applications, and instructive organization of Discourse, Grammar and Ideology ... mark the importance of its contribution to discourse studies. * Journal of Language and Politics * To say that this book takes great theoretical strides in critical-cognitive discourse analysis would be an understatement. Christopher Hart has succeeded, better than anyone before, in producing a genuinely linguistic, cutting-edge, global account of complex issues of ideology and its enactment in discourse. Methodologically rigorous yet descriptively lucid and illuminating, his book is a must-read for all scholars seeking systematic, grammar-based frameworks to analyze discursive facets of the ever changing socio-political space which we are all part of. * Piotr Cap, Professor of Linguistics, University of Lodz, Poland * It is a pleasure to read a book that steps back and surveys the field of CDA from a theoretical linguistic perspective to compare two distinct grammatical approaches to ideology in text. This is a landmark text in the development of CDA. * Lesley Jeffries, Professor of Linguistics, University of Huddersfield, UK *