Analysing language data systematically and looking closely at how people formulate their thoughts can reveal astonishing insights about the human mind. Without presupposing specific subject knowledge, this book gently introduces its readers to theoretical insights as well as practical principles for systematic linguistic analysis from a cognitive perspective. Drawing on Thora Tenbrink's twenty years' experience in both linguistics and cognitive science, this book offers theoretical guidance and practical advice for doing cognitive discourse analysis. It covers areas of analysis as diverse as attention, perspective, granularity, certainty, inference, transformation, communication, and cognitive strategies, using inspiring examples from many different projects. Simple techniques and tools are used to allow readers new to the subject easy ways to apply the methods, without the need for complex technologies, whilst the cross-disciplinary approach can be applied to a diverse range of research purposes and contexts in which language and thought play a role.

In contemporary linguistics, both cognitive and critical approaches to language have been elaborated in some detail. Unfortunately, the two perspectives have seldom converged, despite the potential theoretical advances such collaboration offers. The contributions to this volume explore the convergence of cognitive and critical trends in the guise of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis. The volume addresses a range of socio-political discourses in various international contexts, including discourses on nation, education, immigration, and war. One single integrated model is not presented, but rather, a number of methodologies are developed and assessed across the chapters. The application of established cognitive linguistic theories, including conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending theory and frame semantics, are discussed, as well as developing theories, such as metaphor power theory and discourse space theory. The book is of value to anyone interested in the interaction between language, mind, and society, including both students and scholars of cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is an exciting research enterprise in which scholars are concerned with the discursive reproduction of power and inequality. However, researchers in CDS are increasingly recognising the need to investigate the cognitive dimensions of discourse and context if they want to fully account for any connection between language, legitimisation and social action. This book presents a collection of papers in CDS concerned with various ideological discourses. Analyses are firmly rooted in linguistics and cognition constitutes a major focus of attention. The chapters, which are written by prominent researchers in CDS, come from a broad range of theoretical perspectives spanning pragmatics, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. The book is essential reading for anyone working at the cutting edge of CDS and especially for those wishing to explore the central place that cognition must surely hold in the relationship between discourse and society.

This volume presents selected papers from the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference within the area of discourse analysis. The topics addressed include pronominal anaphora in English and Russian narratives, the subtleties of the definite article in English and Spanish, the use of discourse particles in Dutch, and the function of prosody as a marker of text structure in spoken narratives. The papers illustrate the potential of the emerging cognitive linguistic paradigm to provide fresh, revealing insights in the study of discourse.

In recent years, research in cognitive linguistics has expanded its interests to cover a variety of texts – spoken, written, or multimodal. Analytical tools such as conceptual metaphor, frame semantics, mental spaces and grammatical constructions have been productively applied in various discourse contexts. In this volume, originally published as a special issue of English Text Construction 3:2 (2010), the contributors, a mix of established and emerging authors in the field, analyse broadcast and print journalism, argumentative scientific discourse, radio lectures on music, and the main literary genres (the poetry of Szymborska and bpNichol, the drama of Shakespeare, the modernist prose of Virginia Woolf and recent fiction by John Banville). Collectively the findings suggest a need to broaden and refine the cognitive linguistic repertoire, while also uncovering new ways to interpret textual data. The book will appeal to researchers and graduate students with interests in cognitive poetics and linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and construction grammar.

This study advances a model for Critical Discourse Analysis which draws on Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics, applied in a critical analysis of immigration discourse. It will be of special interest to students and researchers with which to explore new perspectives in CDA.