Discourse And Ideology: A Sociocognitive Analysis Of First British Prime Ministerial Debate Transcript

Critical discourse analysis mainly concerns the relationship between discourse and ideology. It aims to reveal how ideology is enacted through discourse. Since its foundation, critical discourse analysis has gained rapid developments. At the same time, the criticism also arises. And one of the main criticisms is its ignorance of cognitive dimensions which play crucial roles in production and explanation of discourse. So in order to avoid this inadequacy, this thesis will try to adopt van Dijk sociocognitive model in its critical study of first British Prime Ministerial debate transcript.The data comes from the first British Prime Ministerial debate. On 15 April 2010, UK held the first debate in the history of Prime election. And in the debate, language plays a very important role and to speak effectively, the candidates can build themselves good images and gain more supports. So, it deserves our efforts to explore the language strategies used by the candidates. And this thesis conducts a sociocognitive critical study of the debate language. First, van Dijk's discourse-cognition-society triangle and the key concepts are discussed. Then the analysis of the candidates'language features is carried out from two aspects: personal pronoun and tense. And finally, the context which emphasizes the subjective or cognitive dimensions is integrated to explain the interaction of discourse and society.The study illustrates the application of the sociocognitive approach in debate transcript analysis and shows that it is very important to value cognition in critical discourse analysis. And van Dijk's discourse-cognition-society triangle is a reasonable and applicable framework for an adequate critical discourse analysis.