Browse, Sam. 2018. Cognitive Rhetoric: The Cognitive Poetics of Political Discourse

Cognitive Rhetoric is an innovative contribution to the growing body of academic literature on cognitive stylistics (Brône & Vandaele 2009; Gavins & Steen 2003; Semino & Culpeper 2002; Stockwell 2002, 2014). This is a rapidly expanding field at the intersection of (cognitive) linguistics, literary studies and rhetoric, narratology, and cognitive science.

Stemming from theoretical foundations rooted in Aristotelian thought, notably the three rhetorical appeals of ethos (arguments built on the identity of the speaker), logos (arguments built on reason) and pathos (arguments built on the audience’s emotional response), this book investigates audience responses to political discourse by focusing on the processes of its perception. As Browse acknowledges in the very beginning, “the primary purpose of this book, then, is to present a reception-oriented account which examines how identity, argument, and emotions shape audience responses to the language of political discourse” (2018: 1).

Cognitive Rhetoric is a compilation of eight chapters that sketches a reception-oriented account of political discourse using a wide variety of empirical evidence – from political speeches, (televised) interviews, and newspaper articles to more creative media such as politicized rap music, TV satire, and filmic drama. The diversity of the issues addressed in the book is integrated into a representative sample of research across diverse analytical and theoretical approaches (including schema theory, blending theory, text world theory, cognitive grammar, critical discourse analysis, and narrative research, among others).

Apart from an Introduction (Chapter 1), which introduces the three-dimensional reception-oriented approach to political discourse, and a Conclusion (Chapter 8), which summarizes the main arguments and highlights their implications for future work, the book consists of three sets of two chapters that cover the Aristotelian triad: Part I Ethos (Chapters 2 and 3), Part II Logos (Chapters 4 and 5), and Part III Pathos (Chapters 6 and 7). In doing so, the thematic organization of the volume leads the reader from the identity and loyalty of the speaker (Part I) to audience’s rational (Part II) and emotional (Part III) response.

More concretely, Part I accentuates the active engagement of the audience who may bring their own prior knowledge and political standpoint to the communicative event. In this sense, Chapter 2, “Layers of Ethos,” outlines a conceptual scaffolding of the socio-cognitive approach to ethos by using concepts and notions from cognitive narratology. A three-layered network of narratological accounts is unfolded, namely single speaker/narrator, cinematic narrator, and implied author. Chapter 3, “The Conceptual Ecology of Ethos,” introduces the reader to a cognitive stylistic framework for analyzing the speaker’s ethos in audience perception. This means that speakers often adapt their speech style in relation to communicative goals. As Browse argues, “speakers perform different styles in different social contexts to construct identity” (ibid.: 63).

Part II stresses the significance of speaker’s or writer’s appeal to logos from a recipient centered approach. Chapter 4, “Logos as Representation,” stresses the interaction between any kind of text (either written text or oral speech) and audience’s background knowledge. In other words, audience bring their own conceptual load to the discourse event in order to (re)construct their “own conceptual model of reality” (ibid.: 122). In a similar vein, Chapter 5, “Logos as Conceptual Mapping,” presents a series of arguments in favor of the importance of analogy as a pre-linguistic cognitive structure by focusing on metaphors.

Part III illustrates the audience’s emotional response to political texts based on Stockwell’s (2014) model of literary ambience (Chapter 6, “Rhetorical Ambience”) and the resonant effect (Chapter 7, “Political Resonance”).

Chapters 2–7, then, provide “an assemblage of discourse structures all working in concert to produce rhetorical effects on the audience” (Browse 2018: 210). Lastly, the concluding chapter (Chapter 8) traces six possible areas of further investigation in which one may develop this three-dimensional reception-oriented approach to political discourse: namely experimental methods of reader-response data, cognitive ethnography of reception, corpus linguistic methods, metaphor analysis in political discourse, persuasive techniques, and context relevance.

Interestingly, two of the main contributions may be seen also as potential weaknesses. First, the book gives space to a variety of diverse theoretical approaches all aiming at furthering the understanding of conceptual structures and processes in political discourse in reception with the expectation to articulate a meta theory of cognitive stylistics. However, quite often these theories contradict each other; naturally, this leads us to the following question that Browse should ideally take into account: how would he deal with potential conflicts between the different theoretical frameworks? Second, the volume highlights the dimensions of embodied meaning, consisting of cognitive and experiential processes and structures independent of language, such as the analogy-making (as illustrated in Chapter 5). However, with its emphasis on embodied meaning, the situated levels of experience are somewhat less scrutinized. In the spirit of cognitive semiotics, the need for a richer approach in meaning making applied to metaphor studies is suggested in terms of the integration of both communicative and cognitive dimensions as well as contextually-bounded knowledge and culture specificity (e. g. Devylder and Zlatev In press; Stampoulidis et al. 2019).

The logic behind the structure of the book is clear for the reader. Similarly, the choice of real-life empirical material contributes to the book’s readability and credibility. The concise conclusion aptly brings together the topics addressed by the book, and if the reader missed any of the connections between chapters, the relation between them is made clear here. It also pursues one of the book’s ongoing goals, which is to scrape together disparate theoretical apparatuses.

To conclude, the volume is well written and well structured. There are a few issues, however, as has been mentioned before – mostly in terms of a potential eclecticism in using a range of different theories, as the author himself admits: “the range of theoretical frameworks covered is extensive and eclectic” (ibid.: 24). In general, though, the book convincingly demonstrates how “the cognitive rhetorical, reception-oriented study of political discourse [is] such an exciting prospect for future research” (ibid.: 210, emphasis added). Therefore, it constitutes an essential read for both students and researchers interested in understanding persuasive strategies used in political discourse through the lenses of a cognitive rhetorical approach.