ENG523 Final Term Bitcoin

Lecture-08 Political · Discourse and the Role of · Multimedia in Discourse · Analysis · POLITICAL DISCOURSE · Representation: Metaphor

One of the central concerns of political discourse is the question of how the world is presented to the public through particular forms of linguistic representation. For example, how is language used in attributing meaning to individuals and groups with reference to the performance of their social practices? How are actions and events perceived and described? Which modes of reference are used to signify places, objects and institutions within particular positive or negative frames? The claim is that “reality” is not simply given to us through language; rather it is mediated through different forms of language representation.

An interesting view has recently arisen in cognitive science concerning the nature of mental representation. This view is exemplified by the following passages: Most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is persistent in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The basic-level metaphors allow us to comprehend and draw inferences about these [emotion] concepts, using our knowledge of familiar, well-structured domains. In short, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another. Human cognition is fundamentally shaped by various poetic or figurative processes.

As these quotations indicate, some researchers in cognition and language have argued that mental representation is at least in part metaphoric. Rather than seeing metaphors as being solely or even primarily a linguistic phenomenon, they have proposed it as a mode of representation and thought.

The reasoning behind this is that certain aspects of our knowledge are difficult for people to represent: They are overly abstract and complex, and therefore they are represented in terms of easier-to-understand domains, that is, metaphorically. Therefore, when we think about abstract ideas such as inflation, the mind, or anger, we use more concrete concepts, a process which "allows us to refer to it [an abstract concept], quantify it, identify a particular aspect of it and perhaps even believe that we understand it" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).

The argument for metaphoric representation is often made as part of an argument for Cognitive Linguistics as championed by Lakoff and his colleagues. However, I believe that the issue of metaphoric representation is an interesting and radical idea which deserves attention in its own right. Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1980) present the use of metaphor in thought as just one part of a predominant theory of the nature of the mind. But their arguments about "objectivist metaphysics," generative approaches to linguistics and other controversial ideas may have drawn attention away from this specific claim. Therefore, in this article I will examine metaphoric representation as a theory of conceptual structure. I will not be addressing most of the other views of its proponents. Of those views, metaphoric representation has probably had the most direct influence on psychological research, through theories of idiom and metaphor comprehension. That said, however, it will be impossible to avoid mentioning other views expressed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) or Lakoff (1987), because some of them are used to provide support for the notion of metaphoric representation.

One disadvantage in discussing metaphoric representation is that it is necessary to discuss verbal metaphor. And as is well known, metaphor is one of the most difficult and intransigent problems in language. Indeed, even defining metaphor is by no means an easy task. For the present purposes, then, a minimal description will have to serve. In verbal metaphor, there are usually two explicit parts: a topic, which is the entity being talked about, and the vehicle, which is the metaphoric material being predicated of the topic. (Some authors refer to these as the target and source, respectively.) For example, in Lee is a block of ice, Lee is the topic, and block of ice is the vehicle. The implicit connection between the two is often referred to as the ground. In this case, the ground is that blocks of ice have a cold temperature, and this is interpreted in terms of emotional unresponsiveness.

More generally, the relation between temperature and emotion provides the ground. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) do not provide a detailed theory of verbal metaphor; their discussion seems to accept this kind of view. That is, in insisting that representations are metaphoric or metonymic, they are contrasting them with a more straightforward relation (called direct understanding). Since the metaphoric relation is not direct, some kind of mapping is necessary. And in fact, much of Lakoof and Johnson and Kovecses (1986) consist in spelling out the mappings behind various conceptual metaphors.

Things turn “Critical”

In the late 1970s theorists suggested that the surface realization of language represented the transformation of an underlying reality (Wilson 1990). The work was based, mainly, on Halliday’s (1985) functional linguistic theory, which viewed language as a “social fact.” In this view social and cognitive aspects become reflected within grammar. Politics and ideology were seen as displayed through grammatical structure, and analyzing language in this way was referred to as “Critical Linguistics.” This approach has since been expanded, both in methodology and theory, and is now seen as part of the broader analytic program known as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Wodak and Meyer (2009) moving the “linguistic” to a “multidisciplinary and multi-methodological level”; although grammar remains a central tool in explaining how ideology, power, and domination become constituted through linguistic structures.

Van Dijk argues that CDA should not be seen as a method but as a form of critically driven theory and practice operationalized by politically concerned discourse analysts, whose aim is to use a variety of methods in the study of power abuse and inequality within society. Such an approach has been criticized for its own internal politicization, since it seems to begin with the assumption that certain data sets produce power abuse and then sets off to find and describe such abuse. Consequently, it is suggested that critical analysts are in danger of confirming what they already believed from the start. Further, CDA has been criticized for its claim to use linguistic analysis to confirm forms of power abuse. Widdowson (1995) argues that because of its critical orientation CDA “essentially sociological or socio-political rather than linguistic.” And it is also possible that the political critique of political discourse for political purposes becomes a form of political discourse itself.

In the past 20 years the “critical” approach to language and to political discourse in particular, has been one of the fastest-growing areas of applied linguistic research. Many of the scholars writing on CDA have also been leaders in the field of political discourse; for example, Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, and Teun van Dijk. The critical analyst sees political discourse as the use of words