Discourse

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. One site where these two perspectives have most successfully and most visibly converged is in the critical study of metaphor, which now constitutes one of the most productive and pervasive methodological approaches to ideological discourse research. More recently, however, the utility of combining Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis has been expounded in relation to a wider range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. In this chapter, then, I only very briefly touch up on critical metaphor studies and concentrate instead on some of the other ways in which Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis can be usefully combined to shed light on the ideological properties of texts and conceptualisation. 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 strands inside a single, integrated framework