Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political Discourse Under The Approach Of Cognitive Linguistics

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)is an approach to disclose the underlying ideology,identity and inequality of political discourse.The mainstream of CDA views Systemic Functional Linguistics as its theoretical basis to analyze the hidden ideology of language structures.Although a number of studies have been done,there are also some critical and doubtful voices.The theoretical framework,research methods and the objectivity of research results are questioned.The development of Cognitive Linguistics brings the relationship between language and cognition into attention.The theories of Cognitive Linguistics,such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory,can provide new thoughts and approaches for CDA and make up for the deficiency of CDA.Therefore,the integration of CDA and Cognitive Linguistics has gradually become a new trend.This study attempts to integrate CDA and Cognitive Linguistics to analyze the language strategies applied by Brexit camp to convey their ideologies and influence the cognition of the public.The Britain referendum on leaving EU or staying in EU has attracted extremely wide attention around the world.The referendum ended up with the result of Brexit(Britain exiting from EU),which astonished the whole world.Due to the lack of direct experience in political events,the ordinary people in Britain do not have profound understanding for political events so they have to take advantage of the media to establish their cognition.It’s believed that the reporting of British media played a significant role in affecting the voting of the public.Thus,this study regards Brexit reports as its research object.The discourses for analysis are 30 news reports from the Sun which belongs to Brexit camp.The theoretical framework of this study is built up by Conceptual Blending Theory and Discourse Space Theory.The strategies that text-producers used to construct metaphors and discourse spaces in Brexit reports are analyzed.In this study,Conceptual Blending Theory has been applied as a toolkit to analyze the conceptual blending process of the frequently used metaphors in Brexit reports to reveal howtext-producers of Brexit camp construct conceptual associations in text-consumers’ mind to affect their cognition of the Brexit issue.Discourse Space Theory has been applied to disclose the text-producers’ strategies to construct discourse spaces in Brexit reports from three dimensions including temporal,spatial and modality spaces.The critical analysis of discourse spaces can present how text-producers bridge the distance from the public and earn their trust and support.It’s found that text-producers of Brexit reports are good at taking advantage of text-consumers’ cognitive characteristics,which can assist them in strategically constructing metaphors and discourse spaces to affect British people’s cognition and attitude towards issues such as the EU and immigration.The cognitive critical discourse analysis can help to disclose the ideological meaning of politicians underlying the Brexit discourses,which is difficult to be identified literally by the public but influences their cognition unconsciously.In addition,it can be meaningful in raising text-consumers’ critical awareness and providing references for understanding or evaluating political discourses.