Beyond the issues: A linguistic and conceptual study of American public discourse

Cultural cognitive models (CCMs) are learned and shared by members of cultural communities and serve as shortcuts to the presentation and understanding of communicative events, including public discourse. They are made up of "frames," here defined as prototypical representations of recurrent cultural experiences or historical references that contain culturally-agreed-upon sets of participants, event scenarios, and evaluations. The frames in turn evoke full models, complete with presuppositions, entailments, and other patterns of reasoning and cognition.; These prototypical CCMs have both linguistic and non-linguistic components, which by means of conventionalized contextualization cues (Gumperz) evoke the CCMs for those with cultural competence. We can fruitfully study CCMs using linguistic methodologies: cognitive linguistics (including metaphor theory), frame semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and attention to context.; Once a CCM has been evoked, it is used as the basis for further reasoning. CCMs can thus become subject to manipulation, since, like any other less-than-complete schematized representation of events and experiences, they necessarily selectively hide and highlight aspects of the experience.; The first case study presented here is an examination of the major CCMs used for political self-presentation by Newt Gingrich in his January, 1995, "inaugural" speech as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The second looks at metaphorical CCMs and linked behavior, specifically with respect to the domain of "business" as understood in the 1980s and early 1990s by two prominent American business schools, Harvard and Wharton (University of Pennsylvania). The third case study briefly examines, for comparison, some CCMs found in public diplomacy and newspaper reporting related to the Northern Ireland peace process.; The next chapter looks at our CCM for manipulating CCMs, namely, that of "propaganda." Rosch's prototype theory helps explain the simultaneous accuracy and inaccuracy of the propaganda analysts' repeated assertion that there are no important differences between political propaganda and product advertisements.; The work begins and ends with a comparison to previous single-issue-focused analyses of public discourse, showing how a CCM-based analysis can both systematically explain earlier observations and extend them into a wider view of sociocultural cognition and behavior.