Language and Ideology

Together with its sister volume on Theoretical Cognitive Approaches, this volume explores the contribution which cognitive linguistics can make to the identification and analysis of overt and hidden ideologies. This volume shows that descriptive tools which cognitive linguistics developed for the analysis of language-in-use are highly efficient for the analysis of ideologies as well. Amongst them are the concept of grounding and the speaker’s deictic centre, iconographic reference, frames, cultural cognitive models as a subgroup of Idealized Cognitive Models, conceptual metaphors, root metaphors, frames as groups of metaphors, mental spaces, and conceptual blending.
The first section ‘Political metaphor and ideology’ discusses topics such as Nazi Germany, discrimination of Afro-Americans, South Africa’s “rainbow nation”, and the impeachment campaign against President Clinton. The second section, on cross-cultural “Otherness” deals with cultural clashes such as those between the Basque symbolic world and the general European value systems; between the Islam and the West, determining its treatment of Iraq in the Gulf War; and between Hong Kong “Otherness” and centuries of Western dominance. The third section deals with ‘Metaphors for institutional ideologies’ and concentrates on the globalisation of the North and South American markets, on insults in (un)parliamentary debates, and on the Internet being for sale.

Denis J. Brion, Washington & Lee Law School, in the Int. Jnl. for Germanic Linguistics & Semiotic Analysis, Vol. 10:1 (2005):
As a group, these papers contribute substantively to the broad project of cognitive linguistics. They offer an understanding of meaning as a proces rather than a structure. [...] And, at a fundamental level, they equip the reader with the ability to see text as chronicles of the working of the human mind.