The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 126 docx

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its
challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, George, and Zolta
´
nKo
¨
vecses. 1987. The cognitive model of anger inherent in
American English. In Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, eds., Cultural models in
language and thought 195–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1994. Culture, cognition, and grammar. In Martin Pu
¨
tz, ed., Lan-
guage contact and language conflict 25–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lee, Penny. 1996. The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Lenneberg, Eric. 1967. Biological foundations of language. New York: John Wiley.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1997. From outer to inner space: Linguistic categories and non-
linguistic thinking. In Jan Nuyts and Eric Pederson, eds., Language and conceptuali-
zation 13–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lutz, Catherine A. 1987. Goals, events, and understanding in Ifaluk emotion theory. In
Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, eds., Cultural models in language and thought
290–312. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lutz, Catherine A. 1988. Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesion atoll
and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Medubi, Oyinkan. 2003. Language and ideology in Nigerian cartoons. In Rene
´
Dirven,
Roslyn Frank, and Martin Pu
¨

tz, eds., Cognitive models in language and thought:
Ideology, metaphors and meanings 159–97. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Palmer, Gary B. 1996. Toward a theory of cultural linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Quinn, Naomi. 1987. Convergent evidence for a cultural model of American marriage. In
Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, eds., Cultural models in language and thought
173–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quinn, Naomi. 1991. The cultural basis of metaphor. In James W. Fernandez, ed., Beyond
metaphor: The theory of tropes in anthropology 56–93. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Quinn, Naomi. 1997. Research on shared task solutions. In Claudia Strauss and Naomi
Quinn, eds., A cognitive theory of cultural meaning 137–88. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Quinn, Naomi, and Dorothy Holland. 1987. Culture and cognition. In Dorothy Holland
and Naomi Quinn, eds., Cultural models in language and thought 3–40. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schatzberg, Michael G. 2001. Political legitimacy in Middle Africa. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Senft, Gunter. 1998. Frames of spatial reference in Kilivila: Studies in language, cognition and
the conceptualization of space. LAUD Paper no. 424. Essen, Germany: Linguistic
Agency of the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Sharifian, Farzad. 2003. On cultural conceptualisations. Journal of Cognition and Culture 3:
187–207.
Sweetser, Eve. 1987. The definition of ‘lie’: An examination of the folk models underlying a
semantic prototype. In Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, eds., Cultural models
in language and thought 43–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 1983. How language structures space. In Herbert L. Pick, Jr., and Linda
P. Acredolo, eds., Spatial orientation: Theory, research and application 225–82. New
York: Plenum Books.
1220 rene
´

dirven, hans-georg wolf, and frank polzenhagen
Turner, Mark. 1987. Death is the mother of beauty: Mind, metaphor, criticism. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Werker, Janet F., and Richard C. Tees. 1984. Phonemic and phonetic factors in adult cross-
language speech perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 75: 1866–78.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1992. Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in
culture-specific configurations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1999. Emotions across languages and cultures: Diversity and universals.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolf, Hans-Georg. 1994. A folk model of the ‘‘Internal Self’’ in light of the contemporary view
of metaphor: The self as subject and object. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag.
Wolf, Hans-Georg. 2001. English in Cameroon. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Wolf, Hans-Georg, and Frank Polzenhagen. Forthcoming. Cultural linguistic approaches to
World Englishes: A corpus-based cognitive linguistic analysis of the community model in
African English as a paradigmatic study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Wolf, Hans-Georg, and Augustin Simo Bobda. 2001. The African cultural model of
community in English language instruction in Cameroon: The need for more sys-
tematicity. In Martin Pu
¨
tz, Susanne Niemeier, and Rene
´
Dirven, eds., Applied cognitive
linguistics, vol. 2, Language pedagogy 225–59. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Yu, Ning. 1998. The contemporary theory of metaphor: A perspective from Chinese. Am-
sterdam: John Benjamins.
Zlatev, Jordan. 1997. Situated embodiment: Studies in the emergence of spatial meaning.
Stockholm: Gotab Press.
cognitive linguistics and cultural studies 1221
chapter 47

COGNITIVE
LINGUISTICS,
IDEOLOGY, AND
CRITICAL DISCOURSE
ANALYSIS

rene
´
dirven,
frank polzenhagen,
and hans-georg wolf
1. Introduction: Ideology, A Vast
Research Field Outside
Cognitive Linguistics

Since the late 1970s, the linguistic study of ideology and discourse has been the
home territory of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The development of this
research framework is thoroughly documented in Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard
(1996) and in Toolan’s (2002) four-volume reader, which covers the movement’s
intellectual roots in the social sciences and its precursors (e.g., Bakhtin 1982, 1986;
Bourdieu 1991), the various theoretical approaches of its major proponents (e.g.,
Fowler and Kress 1979; Fairclough 1989, 1992, 1995; Wodak 1989; Hodge and Kress
1993; van Dijk 1993, 1997, 1998), and a number of central case studies. A more con-
cise overview of the field can be found in Blommaert and Bulcaen (2000) and in
Blommaert ( 2005). CDA is a highly heterogeneous research program. Its dominant
linguistic approach has its footing in Functional Grammar, in particular Systemic-
Functional Grammar as developed by Halliday ( 1985), who himself has made major
contributions to the field (e.g., Halliday 1978). Yet there is also a cognitive strand,
notably through the work of van Dijk (e.g., 1997, 1998), and there is a strong dis-
cussion on further interdisciplinarity (e.g., Wodak and Chilton 2005) and on further

methodological and theoretical pluralism, including an opening toward Cognitive
Linguistics (e.g., Chilton 2005; O’Halloran 2003). Given the diversity and vastness
of the field, the label ‘‘critical linguistics’’ has been introduced, which also com-
prises approaches such as feminist linguistics and ecolinguistics.
From the past decade on, the issue of ideology and discourse has received in-
creasing attention from scholars working within the Cognitive Linguistics frame-
work, and the aim of this chapter is to survey the particular contributions and
insights this theoretical perspective may yield beyond the analytic methods applied
so far by CDA scholars, keeping in mind the David and Goliath relationship
between the two (see also Stockwell 1999). Given the convergence with CDA work,
this survey of cognitive linguistic ideology research intends to implicitly and ex-
plicitly strengthen the common interests of the two frameworks.
First, some terminological clarifications may be in order. The terms ‘‘discourse’’
and ‘‘ideology’’ have been applied in several different ways and against various the-
oretical backgrounds. For the scope of the present chapter, a methodological dis-
tinction is made between a broad and a narrow understanding of the two notions,
largely abstracting from competing theoretical positions. Discourse, then, can refer
(i) to long-term discursive practices in social interactions, constituting social prac-
tices in a broad, Foucaultian understanding (e.g., the discourse on AIDS), or, (ii)
more narrowly, to actual written or spoken textual material like this chapter or
book. Both CDA and the cognitive linguistic approach address these two levels of
discourse, although detailed text-linguistic analyses are still the hallmark of CDA.
Likewise, two understandings of ideology, a broad one (ideology i) and a narrow
one (ideology ii), can be distinguished. The broad view holds ideology to be ‘‘a
system of thought’’ which is not taken in any philosophical or political sense, ‘‘but
rather as an implicit or explicit set of norms and values which provide patterns
for acting and/or patterns for living within a given social network’’ (Dirven 1990:
565). CDA scholars may conceive of these largely unconscious norms as ‘‘pre-
ideological’’ or as ‘‘common ground’’ (see van Dijk 2002; Wolf and Polzenhagen
2003: 250) and generally tend toward a more restricted understanding of ideology.

In CDA, ideology is seen, first of all, as a ‘‘modality of power,’’ that is, as attitudes
with respect to social relations of dominance. Leaning on Bourdieu, Fairclough
(2003: 9), for instance, states that ‘‘ideologies are representations of aspects of the
world which can be shown to contribute to establishing, maintaining and changing
social relations of power, domination and exploitation.’’ As implied above, how-
ever, from a cognitive linguistic perspective, such overt ideologies are not separated
from conventional conceptualizations shared by a particular social group; in other
words, the broad and narrow understanding of ideology are highly intertwined. As
ideology and critical discourse analysis 1223
one of the first cognitive linguistic ideology researchers, Lakoff states the link in an
interview with Pires de Oliveira as follows:
Ideologies have both conscious and unconscious aspects. If you ask someone
with a political ideology what she believes, she will give a list of beliefs and perhaps
some generalisations. A cognitive linguist, looking at what she says, will most likely
pick out unconscious frames and metaphors [and other conceptual units; our
addition] lying behind her conscious beliefs. It is there that cognitive lin-
guists have a contribution to make. (Pires de Oliveira 2001: 37)
It is the particular strength of Cognitive Linguistics that it allows for and aims
at an analysis of ideology on both levels. What both levels share is the notion of
perspective. Cognitive Linguistics thus relates ‘‘ideology in language’’ to conceptual
and linguistic phenomena that establish specific, though often unconscious, per-
spectives on the world, be it in the broad or in the narrow sense of ideology, or
predispose speakers to such perspectives.
This double layer of unconscious and conscious ideologization will deter-
mine the structure of this chapter, in addition to the distinctions to be made in the
tools of analysis. The first cognitive linguistic analyses all remain within the nar-
rower framework of metaphor research a
`
la Lakoff and Johnson (1980), but grad-
ually further and more powerful conceptual tools are developed. Phenomena that

establish potentially ideological perspectives are traced on different levels of lin-
guistic description. Section 2 outlines the ideological dimension of metaphor, with
the emphasis on covert ideology in the discourse domain of economics. Section 3
develops the notions of ‘‘ideological deixis’’ and ‘‘iconographic frames of reference,’’
with the focus on overt ideology in political discourse. Section 4 explores gram-
matical means that reflect deep-rooted unconscious norms within a sociocultural
group. Section 5, finally, discusses the pervasiveness of metaphor and the role of
cultural models in the highly abstract domain of science and addresses their more
often than not ideological orientation, more specifically in the metalanguage of bi-
ological and linguistic discourse.
2. Traditional Cognitive
Linguistic Metaphor Research
on Ideology: The Case
of Economic Discourse

Traditionally, cognitive linguistic research on ideology has mainly focused on one
tool of conceptualization: metaphor. This approach has been applied to numerous
domains, and we will survey, in an exemplary way, cognitive linguistic studies along
these lines in the domain of economy, more specifically of economy in Western
1224 rene
´
dirven, frank polzenhagen, and hans-georg wolf
popular discourse. Generally, as can be expected in a free-market economy context,
this domain is shaped by metaphors of competition, conflict, and even hostility.
For example, Boers (1997), from his corpus analysis of editorials in The Economist,
notes that metaphors of economic health and fitness are coupled with meta-
phors of an economic race and that accounts of economic activity as war and
fighting occur just as frequently. These observations are further confirmed by
Eubanks (2000) and by Koller’s (2002) study on metaphors in the discourse on
business mergers. Likewise, White and Herrera (2003) have worked out the met-

aphorical models in the press coverage of telecom corporate consolidations. They
describe a complex blend of metaphors, including business is a jungle, where
companies are predators and prey, business is war, and business is colo-
nization. In the former two, competition between companies is conceptualized as
a struggle for survival. In the logic of this scenario, companies are organisms in
an inhospitable habitat, an environment that requires reckless struggle—kill or be
killed—to avoid extinction. White and Herrera (2003) focus on a particular in-
stantiation of this scenario, in which companies are dinosaurs in a prehistoric
Jurassic Park. The underlying metaphorical network is expressed, for instance, in
the following example (1):
(1) Rapacious feeders, for a century or more the telephone companies have
grown even fatter and more complacent, grazing on hunting grounds where
none could challenge them. (taken from White and Herrera 2003: 291)
Unlike the dinosaur metaphor, which is dominated by blind instincts and inevi-
table cause-effect chains, the second set of metaphors, business is war and busi-
ness is colonization, prioritizes the strategic aspect and the underlying hegemonic
intentions. In a similar vein, Wolf and Polzenhagen (2003) have analyzed the con-
ventional nature of such metaphors as trade is war, trade negotiations are
battles, and, less combatively, trade negotiations are contests in the press
coverage of a U.S Japanese trade dispute. The conventional use of the above met-
aphors can be described as ‘‘common ground,’’ as ‘‘pre-ideological,’’ to use van Dijk’s
(2002) terms, thus reflecting an ideological position not drawn upon deliberately by
a group of speakers (also see Wolf and Polzenhagen 2003: 250). Rather, these met-
aphors are part of the stock of deeply entrenched and commonly shared concep-
tualizations among Western speakers of English and other European languages.
Crucial to an understanding of the ideological function of these metaphors
is the notion of ‘‘perspective.’’ Throughout the various theories of metaphor, a
recurrent characteristic determining the nature of metaphor has been that
it presents its target from a particular point of view. This is, for instance, directly
expressed in Black’s (1993) notion of ‘‘perspective,’’ in Davidson’s (1981) ‘‘seeing-

as,’’ and, within Cognitive Linguistics, in Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) no-
tion of ‘‘highlighting and hiding’’ and, more generally, in Langacker’s (e.g., 1987)
notion of ‘‘profiling.’’ The ‘‘highlighting-and-hiding’’ function, for instance, can
be seen at work in the above-mentioned metaphors from the economic domain:
they highlight aspects of (social) Darwinism, aggression, and domination, and
hide, among other things, the mutually beneficial nature of trade and the social
ideology and critical discourse analysis 1225
responsibilities of economic ‘‘players.’’ Importantly, as an experiment by Boers
(1997) has shown, exposure to different metaphors in an economic scenario may
give rise to a perception of the economy as a cooperative enterprise, for example, as
a team sport (Cubo de Severino, Israel, and Zonana 2001), or it may even affect the
decision-making processes of the participants involved, in accordance with the
metaphors used. Thus, rather than merely reflecting a particular ‘‘rhetorical style’’
in the field, metaphors are often indicative of a particular ‘‘style of economics’’
itself (see section 5 for a related analysis). This is manifest in the following abstract
from course material published by a school of management, proposing alterna-
tives to the dominant competitive metaphors in the economic domain (see Wolf
and Polzenhagen 2003: 265):
Metaphors we market by:

Market as jungle

Customers as targets

Marketers
as hunters

Products as mousetraps

Promotions as baits and lures


Sales-
people as baiters and switchers
Toward a new marketing metaphor:

Marketers as gardeners

Customers as plants

Loyalty as roots

Profits as harvest

Marketing as seed, feed, greed, and weed.
This highlighting-and-hiding function of metaphor links up to the broad un-
derstanding of ‘‘discourse’’ in CDA, in that a discourse defines, describes, and de-
limits what it is possible to say and what it is not possible to say (‘‘and by extension—
what is possible to do or not to do’’) and that it ‘‘provides a set of possible statements
about a given area’’ (Kress 1989: 7; see also Wolf and Polzenhagen 2003: 254).
In addition to ideology in economic discourse, metaphor and blending theory
has been applied in the analysis of ideology in various other social domains such as
conservative and liberal politics in the United States (Lakoff 1996), nation building
in South Africa (Dirven 1994), the American constitutional battle around impeach-
ment (Morgan 2001), British (un)parliamentary discourse (Ilie 2001), the school
domain (Urban 1999), the domain of law (Winter 2001), the hidden ideology of the
Internet (Rohrer 2001), and so on.
3. New Paths in Cognitive
Linguistic Research on Overt
Ideology: Political Rhetoric

This section outlines two recently developed Cognitive Linguistic analytic tools:
‘‘ideological deixis’’ and ‘‘iconographic frames of reference.’’ Each of these new ap-
proaches is illustrated here with case studies from the domain of political rhetoric.
As Langacker (1991: 499) has pointed out, a speaker grounds what he or she
says in the speech situation, that is, minimally in relation to the place and time
coordinates of the speaker at speech act time, and in the participants’ commitment
1226 rene
´
dirven, frank polzenhagen, and hans-georg wolf
to cooperating. Recently in Cognitive Linguistics the concept of deixis has been
widened to include a societal function: the speaker’s vantage point relates not only
to the physical coordinates of location in space, to time, and to discourse partic-
ipants, but also to the attitudinal or ideological anchoring of the speaker’s beliefs
and values in his or her cultural world. As Hawkins (1999) observes, ideology is
akin to time and space in that it constitutes a cognitive domain that plays a role in
the meaning-making process of deixis. In view of the fact that in any process of
reference the speaker tries to direct the interlocutor’s attention to a given referent,
ideological deixis involves assessing the effect that a referential act is to have, as-
sessing the current attitude of the audience toward the referent, and determining
how best to manipulate various conceptual tools to achieve the intended rhetorical
effect with this particular audience. In any process of reference, the speaker tries to
direct the interlocutor’s attention to a given referent.
A study by Botha (2001) shows how ideological deixis is used for nation-
building purposes by new South African leaders, especially President Mbeki. He
analyzes how they make use of the positive connotations of the images of a ‘‘new
birth’’ and a splendid, colorful ‘‘rainbow’’ in the coinage of new compounds such
as African Renaissance and rainbow nation in order to transmit the idea and the
ideology of a new and integrated, multiethnic South African nation. In order to
emphasize the strong unity of this rainbow nation, Mbeki exploits the flexibility of
the deictic center in the person of a nation’s leader and relates the first-person

singular pronoun in I am an African not only to the whole of Africa as a continent,
but also to his own country South Africa, and to each of its eleven officially rec-
ognized linguistic and ethnic groups. In order to achieve this identification of the
leader with each of these groups, Mbeki makes different vantage point shifts and
speaks as the African who reappears in each and every national group:
(2) I owe my being to the Khoe and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great
expanses of the beautiful Cape; In my veins courses the blood of the
Malay slaves who came from the East; I am the grandchild of the warrior men
and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led.
Each of the ethnic groups have their own ideologies, grown through and from their
own history, and by means of his vantage shifts in ideological deixis, Mbeki iden-
tifies with each of these groups which are integrating through him in the rainbow
nation and the African continent.
The second recent notion is that of ‘‘iconographic reference,’’ which was de-
veloped in Hawkins (2001) and applied, inter alia, to the Nazi propaganda ma-
chinery in its representation of Jews as lower parasites during the Third Reich. As
the ‘‘parasite’’ image may suggest, an iconographic reference exploits the dis-
cursant’s experience or view of the referent by means of a powerful iconographic
image, that is, a conventionalized semantic unit as in Hawkins’s examples of a
parasite,amonster,avillain, or in Mbeki’s use of a rainbow nation. Iconographic
reference is a dynamic process which selects one such attribute or element from a
wider iconographic frame of reference. In the case of Nazi anti-Jew propaganda, the
frame of reference is an old and deeply entrenched cultural model known as the
ideology and critical discourse analysis 1227
Great Chain of Being (see, e.g., Lovejoy [1936] 1960 for the history of this model in
Western thought). This is a vertical scale on which beings are hierarchically ordered
in aesthetic, moral, and rational terms (see Lakoff and Turner 1989: chapter 4).
Those that are in the top are valued higher than those that rank low, as illustrated in
figure 47.1, and the schematic iconographic images selected from this scale thus bear
a direct conceptual link to a basic value system grounded in fundamental human

experience, a ‘‘root value system’’ in Hawkins’s (2001) terminology.
The great chain of being frame serves as the source domain in numerous
metaphorical processes, for instance, and most importantly for the present chapter,
in the language of oppression. As a chain of dominance, it can be readily used as
a chain of subjugation. This frame and its related value system are referred to, for
example, when members of particular ethnic, social, or religious groups are con-
ceptualized and labeled as lower life-forms (e.g., animals, beasts, parasites) or even
as below life-forms (e.g., chattels or goods). Thus, in the Nazi exploitation of the
Great Chain model, the Aryan race is at the superhuman level (
€
UUbermensch),
whereas the Jewish race is located at the lowest level possible, even below plants.
Simultaneously, this iconographic reference implies the notion of lack of produc-
tivity and living on the resources of other species. In the line of Hawkins’s analysis,
Santa Ana (2003: 208) traces the same mechanism in the anti-Latino discourse in
the United States.
Figure 47.1. The Great Chain of Being iconography (based on Hawkins 2001: 44)
1228 rene
´
dirven, frank polzenhagen, and hans-georg wolf
Lakoff’s (1992) analysis of metaphors in the American rhetoric during the first
Gulf War can also be reinterpreted in terms of iconographic frames of reference.
Hawkins’s concept of iconographic reference readily allows the setup of antithetical
elements, such as the
€
UUbermensch-parasite antithesis. Similarly, Lakoff (1992: 466)
invokes the fairy tale frame with a hero and a villain, and a victim. Lakoff (1992)
identifies two scenarios instantiating this frame, which were employed in the jus-
tification of the war: (i) The Self-Defense Scenario, where Iraq is villain, the United
States is hero, the United States and other ‘‘civilized’’ nations are victims, and the

crime is a death threat, and (ii) the Rescue Scenario, where Iraq is villain, the United
States is hero, Kuwait is victim, the crime is kidnap and rape. The former scenario
proved to be less agreeable to the American public; the latter, however, was readily
embraced and subsequently maintained. Tellingly, George Bush declared victory
before the congress as follows: ‘‘The recent challenge could not have been clearer.
Saddam Hussein was the villain; Kuwait the victim.’’ Numerous other metaphors
employed in the American Gulf War rhetoric are based on the fairy tale frame.
Although trend-setting, Lakoff’s approach was also criticized by various authors,
especially for its data-collecting methods, which were not corpus-based, but rather
impressionistic. Pancake (1993) was the first to use real corpus evidence and pres-
ents further analyses of metaphor use in this context. Equally elaborating on Lakoff
(1992), Rohrer (1995) starts from a written-to-be-spoken corpus and provides an
analysis of Bush’s speeches during the Gulf War. Sandikcioglu (2000, 2001) analyzes
the American news reports in the magazines Time and Newsweek and situates the
Gulf War news coverage in the wider ‘‘Us versus Them’’ antithesis (Western model
versus Orient), in which the West constructs itself as civilized, powerful, mature,
rational, and stable, as opposed to a barbaric, weak, immature, irrational, and un-
stable Orient. These orientalist conceptualizations have far-reaching inferences.
They present ‘‘Us’’ and ‘‘Them’’ as incompatible, with a marked moral asymmetry
built in. An immature and irrational Other cannot be trusted or negotiated with, it
can only have some sense talked into it and be taught a lesson in a didactic war, to use
illustrations from Sandikcioglu’s (2001: 176) Gulf War corpus data.
4. The Covert Ideology
of Alienation and Sexism
in Grammar

As a highly abstract and unconsciously operating system, grammar, by definition,
can only incorporate covert ideology. This holds at least for those areas of grammar
where no variation, and consequently no choice, is possible. But when variation is
possible, the choice offered by the alternatives may pave the way to overt ideology.

ideology and critical discourse analysis 1229