INTRODUCTION FOR THE SPECIAL ISSUE ON SPACE, TIME AND EVALUATION IN IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

In the last decade, a cognitive school has begun to emerge in critical discourse analysis (CDA). Based in cognitive linguistics, this approach sees language as providing a set of indexical prompts for jointly performing a range of conceptual operations constitutive of meaning (Hart, 2010). This view of language argues that the semiotic processes involved in language rely on more general cognitive principles and processes that also function in domains such as vision, action, memory and reasoning (Croft & Cruse, 2004). One fundamental cognitive ability which seems to be crucial for meaning construction in language is a capacity for perspective-taking (Levinson, 2003; Talmy, 2000). In the real world, we necessarily adopt a continually shifting spatial perspective as we negotiate the physical environment. Equally, we experience perspective in remembering, empathizing and judging. In understanding discourse, at any moment in the unfolding text, the hearer is invited to share with the speaker a particular perspective indexed by elements present or presupposed in the text and defined within a mental model. This perspective is not restricted to spatial point of view, but includes also points of view conceptualized in social, temporal, epistemic and deontic ‘space’ (Croft & Cruse, 2004). Such perspectives provide an anchorage point in an intersubjective worldview. Other information in the worldview expressed by the text is organized, evaluated and deliberated over relative to this deictic point of reference (Chilton, 2004). Cognitive approaches to language have modelled the worldviews indexed in text and invoked in the course of discourse in terms of ‘text worlds’ (Werth, 1999), ‘mental spaces’ (Fauconnier, 1994), and, geometrically, in terms of coordinate sets in a threedimensional ‘deictic discourse space’ (Chilton, 2014). Perspective is defined within these models as the ‘background’, ‘base’ or the ‘deictic centre’. What these models have in common is that textual information is cognitively represented relative to some starting point defined as the conceptualizer’s presumed spatial, social, temporal, epistemic and deontic ‘ground’ (cf Hart, 2014; Langacker, 2008). An important challenge for linguistics and discourse analysis, then, is to address how concepts such as distance and focus, which structure our worldviews, are signified in discourse. Here, certain textual elements such as deictic adverbs, personal pronouns and modal verbs have already been identified. However, as the papers included in this special issue demonstrate, the story is certainly much more complex. The role of cognitive worlds and points of view in understanding texts has been studied in branches of discourse analysis such as Stylistics and Poetics (Dancygier, Sanders, & Vandelanotte, 2012; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012; Stockwell, 2009). However, Critical Discourse Studies, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 3, 235–237, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2015.1013480