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In her influential critical ethnography of the European Parliament, Wodak (2009) suggests that th... more In her influential critical ethnography of the European Parliament, Wodak (2009) suggests that the interpenetration of political and media institutions has led to the fictionalization of politics. While ‘front stage’ (Goffman, 1959: 109-140) political performances – for example, set-piece speeches, policy announcements and press conferences – constitute officially recognised and very public genres of political discourse, Wodak (2009: 163) argues that ‘backstage’ processes remain ‘esoteric and mysterious’ to audiences. This, combined with the drive to fictionalize politics, has meant that
the media have started to create the ‘backstage’ of politics through fiction films and soap operas, in order to satisfy a widespread desire among audiences: the urge to know more about how decisions are taken, how politicians live, and what their everyday life might consist of.
(Wodak, 2009: 163)
Fictional discourse is being used to represent, speculate about and even sensationalise political processes normally hidden from “outsiders”.
In this chapter, I argue that such speculation is not just a feature of films and soap operas, but the discourse of media pundits, members of the public and even other politicians. Indeed, both professional journalists and lay audience members often make inferences about the “real” (i.e. backstage) motivations, aims and ambitions of politicians based on the oratorical performances they hear and see on their radios and televisions. Reconstructing backstage processes from front stage performances is thus integral to the way in which professional and lay audiences participate in and consequently “do” politics. For analysts of political discourse, it is therefore important that these reception-side, reconstructive processes are properly understood.
Using journalistic responses to a political speech by the British politician, Ed Miliband, I offer an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for describing how audiences construct a backstage context for the political discourses in which they participate. The discursive practices associated with the reception of political discourse have been the subject of less sustained research in discourse analysis. I consequently turn to two areas of work in social and cognitive psychology for theoretical inspiration. The first, Theory of Mind (ToM, see, for example, Baron-Cohen, 1995; Premack and Woodruff, 1978), has been productively employed by researchers in cognitive stylistics to explain how readers make inferences about the cognitive and emotional states of fictional characters (Nuttall, 2015; Whiteley, 2011; Zunshine, 2003), narrators (Palmer, 2004) and authors (Stockwell, 2016). Our ToM allows us to “read off” cognitive states from behavioural cues and thereby engage in small feats of mind reading (or ‘mind modelling’, c.f. Stockwell, 2009: 140) on a regular basis. I combine ideas from ToM with ‘attribution theory’ – a branch of social psychology which exams how people attribute blame and causality in social situations (see Fiske and Taylor, 1991, for an overview) – to account for how audiences model the minds of politicians to make sense of their front stage linguistic behaviour. I argue that this mind modelling constitutes a form of speculation about the backstage context in which politics is performed.
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Fiske, S. & Taylor, S. (1991) Social Cognition. New York: McGraw-Hill
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin
Nuttall, L. (2015) ‘Attributing minds to vampire sin Richard Matheson’s I am Legend’. Language and Literature. 24(1): 23-39
Palmer, A. (2004) Fictional Minds. London; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978) ‘Does a chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 1(4): 515-526
Stockwell, P. (2016) ‘The texture of authorial intention’. In Gavins, J. & Lahey, E. (eds) World Building: Discourse in the Mind. London: Bloomsbury
Stockwell, P. (2009) Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Whiteley, S. (2011) ‘Text World Theory, real readers and emotional responses to The Remains of the Day’. Language and Literature. 20(1): 23-42
Wodak, R. (2009) The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. London: Palgrave
Zunshine, L. (2003) ‘Theory of mind and experimental representations of fictional consciousness’. Narrative. 11: 270-91
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World Building: Discourse in the Mind, 2015
Discourse Analysts have identified a range of coherent clusters of metaphors that frequently appe... more Discourse Analysts have identified a range of coherent clusters of metaphors that frequently appear across different discourse types. The repeated and systematic appearance of cohering metaphors in discourse joins converging evidence from psycholinguistics and experimental psychology indicating that metaphor is not simply a linguistic phenomenon, but a conceptual phenomenon too. Conceptual Metaphors – systematic mappings between different aspects of human experience – structure the way in which language users conceive of more phenomenologically removed or abstract concepts (Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Insofar as conceptual metaphors are socially shared conceptual structures, they are also a constitutive feature of ideologies (see Goatly, 2007; Lakoff, 2002).
Whilst analysts have tended to focus on coherence in metaphor clusters, there is relatively little investigation of single texts that contain a variety of different conceptual metaphors for the same thing. However, Koller (2005: 205) has noted that the hybrid use of disparate or conflicting metaphors in a single text can often signify ‘struggles over conceptualisation’.
I propose a text-world approach to charting this dialogical struggle over conceptualisations, using it to examine the disparate metaphors for the economy appearing in a selection of op-ed articles on the 2008 British financial crisis. I argue that the text-world architectures of each text scaffold the integration of different conceptual metaphors into larger megametaphors (see Werth, 1994). As writers shift between their own or competing ideological perspectives of the British economic crisis, they switch between disparate megametaphorical conceptions of the economy. I further suggest that the use of conflicting megametaphors, grounded in separate text-worlds, is a strategy for engaging with, and, in the texts discussed, ultimately discrediting the explanations of the economic crisis offered by rival news commentators, politicians and analysts.
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It has long been recognised that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also has impor... more It has long been recognised that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also has important cognitive dimensions (Gibbs, 1994, Lakoff, 1993, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). To find evidence that metaphor is an important feature of the human conceptual system, cognitive linguists have often searched for clusters of metaphor in discourse that manifest a single conceptual metaphor. As Werth (1994) points out, however, in addition to clustering, metaphors can be sustained throughout a discourse. The subtle conceptual effects of these extended metaphors are of particular interest to researchers working in the field of stylistics. In this article, I build on Werth’s (1994) account of extended metaphor to explore in more detail these sustained conceptual effects. Like Werth (1994), I draw on Text World Theory (c.f. Gavins, 2007, Werth 1999) to outline a text-world approach to extended metaphor, proposing the idea of a ‘source-world’ to account for how individual, clause-level metaphors combine across a discourse to create a discourse-level conceptual structure. I argue that the source-worlds of extended metaphor are anchored in the text-world structures discourse participants create as they engage with a text and that this embedding of extended metaphor in the discourse gives rise to some of the subtle conceptual effects to which Werth (1994) alludes. Building on work by Gavins (2007), Steen (2008), Stockwell (1992, 1994, 2002) and Sullivan (2014), I also argue that source-worlds can be more or less foregrounded or pushed into the background of discourse participants’ mental representations of the text and I propose a linguistic framework to account for the phenomenon of extended metaphor foregrounding. I illustrate extended metaphor embedding and foregrounding by analysing a newspaper opinion piece by Matthew D’Ancona (2008) entitled 'Gordon Brown with siren suit and cigar'.
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(2015) 'Brandt, Line: The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction' Cognitive Linguistics. 26(4): 697-701, Oct 27, 2015
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Conference Organisation and CFPs.
Call For Papers for the Conference 'Real Fictions', hosted by Narrare at the University of Tamper... more Call For Papers for the Conference 'Real Fictions', hosted by Narrare at the University of Tampere in April 2018.
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Programme for the conference Style & Response, 11th and 12th November 2016, hosted by the Stylist... more Programme for the conference Style & Response, 11th and 12th November 2016, hosted by the Stylistics Research Group (SRG) at Sheffield Hallam University.
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Talks
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There is a vast body of work by Critical Discourse Analysts examining how political texts propaga... more There is a vast body of work by Critical Discourse Analysts examining how political texts propagate ideologies. Less investigated are the processes by which readers and audiences resist the ideologies proffered by these texts. Adapting Werth’s (1993) notion of Common Ground, I outline a cognitive model of resistant reading and argue that the reader’s apprehension of the author plays a central role in reader resistance.
In Text World Theory, CG is defined as ‘backgrounded information… guaranteed in the text world of the discourse (whatever its status in the speech event in which the discourse is formulated) (Werth, 1993: 41). The parenthetical caveat allows for the creation of a range of non-actual text-worlds. In the case of political discourse, audiences often listen to speeches or read newspaper articles premised on background knowledge with which they do not agree. To create coherent text-world representations of the discourse, resistant readers must ‘model the minds’ (Stockwell, 2009: 140) of authors by constructing an idealised common ground – the knowledge-set upon which audiences construct a model of the world-according-to-the-speaker. Mind modelling the author is thus a fundamental aspect of world-building.
I use data collected from a read aloud experiment to evidence and exemplify this argument. Participants were asked to read a speech by the British Home Secretary, Theresa May MP, about immigration. They were shown one paragraph at a time and asked to provide commentary in a box under each. There were 16 participants and 16 paragraphs, yielding a corpus of 256 comments.
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In this talk, I argue for a cognitive rhetorical approach to political discourse. While ‘politica... more In this talk, I argue for a cognitive rhetorical approach to political discourse. While ‘political discourse’ is often thought to consist of texts such as policy documents, newspaper articles, televised interviews and political speeches, I suggest that it is also constituted by more literary text types, such as novels, television shows, films and memoirs. I outline the advantages of using frameworks from stylistics and narratology, which have traditionally been used to examine literary texts, to analyse the persuasive strategies used in political discourse. Of Aristotle’s three persuasive appeals to ethos, pathos and logos, contemporary Critical Discourse Analysis has tended to focus on logos, or ‘the information structure’ (Stockwell 2009: 166) of the text. Conversely, recent work in cognitive stylistics (for example, Brône & Vandaele 2009, Gavins and Steen 2002, Semino and Culpeper 2002, Stockwell 2002) and cognitive narratology (for example, Fludernik 1996, Herman 2003, 2007, Palmer 2006) has had a more holistic concern for both the emotional impacts of the text (the appeal to pathos), and how texts ethically position authors and readers (the appeal to ethos). In this talk, I use concepts from narratology, such as ‘implied author’ and ‘cinematic narrator’, alongside ideas from recent developments in cognitive narratology, such as ‘mind modelling’, to outline a framework for analysing ethos in political discourse. Throughout the talk, I draw on a variety of examples from literary and non-literary political discourse to illustrate the affordances of such a cognitive rhetorical approach.
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Cognitive linguistic accounts have long held that metaphor in language is evidence for metaphor i... more Cognitive linguistic accounts have long held that metaphor in language is evidence for metaphor in thought. Far from being a rarefied, deviant phenomenon, metaphor is a ubiquitous feature of our everyday speech because it structures our understanding of abstract concepts (Gibbs, 1994, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Through introspection or corpus linguistic analysis, work in linguistics and Discourse Analysis has sought to identify the conventional conceptual metaphors that structure both our social reality and the language we use.
As others have noted (for example, Steen, 2014), this use of the text as evidence for the cognitive processes involved in conceptualisation moves in the opposite direction to work Stylistics. This research is more often geared toward an explanation of the attenuated and fine-grained linguistic analysis of literary and rhetorical effects.
Using Text World Theory (c.f. Gavins, 2007, Werth, 1994, 1999), particularly Werth’s (1994) notion of megametaphor, I investigate the ways in which researchers might talk about the stylistics of metaphor in a way that is sensitive to – and that encompasses – its cognitive dimensions. The aim of the paper is to sketch the beginnings of a situated Cognitive Stylistic framework for analysing the rhetorical and literary effects of figurative language.
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Cognitive approaches have treated figurative language as a mapping between two or more ‘domains’ ... more Cognitive approaches have treated figurative language as a mapping between two or more ‘domains’ (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993; Gibbs, 1994). With some exceptions (e.g. Glucksberg and Keysar, 1993; Bowdle and Gentner, 2005; Steen, 2008), these approaches treat metaphor and simile as expressive of the same underlying cognitive process; a mapping of conceptual structure. Using an example from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, I argue that simile and metaphor not only differ linguistically, but also in the cognitive aesthetic experience they affect in readers. I explore this conceptual difference with regard to how similes evoke and profile different areas of domain structure; how this structure is construed; and how it occludes, or backgrounds, the literal domain of comparison (c.f. Langacker, 1987, 1990, 2008). A description of these text-driven (Werth, 1999) cognitive dynamics could provide the basis for a specification of literary – as opposed to “everyday” – similes.
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Cognitive approaches have stressed that metaphor is more than just a figurative aspect of languag... more Cognitive approaches have stressed that metaphor is more than just a figurative aspect of language, but constitutive of the way in which we think about abstract target domains (Ortony, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993; Gibbs, 1994). In his paper, I examine two approaches to metaphor – conceptual metaphor theory (CMT, c.f. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1993) and blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) – from the perspective of analysing metaphor as a discourse phenomenon. By discourse, it is here meant ‘a text and an evoked context’ (Werth, 1999: 86). Alongside Werth (1994), I argue that CMT is incapable of explaining the conceptual effects created by the appearance in the text of multiple extended metaphors from disparate ‘conceptual keys’ (Charteris-Black, 2004). In this respect, it is not flexible enough to provide a fine-grained analysis of metaphor in a single discourse. Conversely, blending theory is too flexible – the principles of a metaphor’s integration into the reader’s mental model of the text are too ill-defined. In answer to these challenges, I argue that the metaphors appearing in a text should be analysed within the broader conceptual context of the text-worlds created by the reader as the discourse proceeds. As a cognitive discourse grammar (Werth, 1999) which is centrally concerned with the creation and management of conceptual space, text-world theory (c.f. Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007) is ideal for such an analysis. To illustrate my argument, I make repeated reference to an article by Benjamin Barber called Decade of Eroded Trust did the Damage. The article appeared on the website of the British broadsheet newspaper, The Guardian, in October, 2008.
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Cognitive approaches have stressed that metaphor is more than just a figurative aspect of languag... more Cognitive approaches have stressed that metaphor is more than just a figurative aspect of language, but constitutive of the way in which we think about abstract target domains (Ortony, 1979; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993; Gibbs, 1994). In real discourse, multiple and mixed metaphors are often used to describe the same target domain across the same text. If conceptual metaphors underpin our understanding of abstract target domains, there needs to be a way of accounting for conceptual coherence across a text when mixed source domains are mapped onto a single target domain. This paper examines two approaches to metaphor – conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1993) and blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) – and the way in which these approaches deal with the phenomenon of mixed metaphor in an economics “op-ed” article. The article, entitled Decades of Eroded Trust did the Damage, appeared on the website of the British broadsheet newspaper, The Guardian, in October 2008. Having considered the strengths and weaknesses of conceptual metaphor theory and blending theory, it is argued that there are still some gaps in the way we account for metaphor comprehension and cohesion across a text. Accordingly, the paper describes four key issues that a theoretical framework for metaphor needs to address in order to adequately deal with mixed metaphor.
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Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an ‘unabashedly normative’ (Van Dijk, 1993: 253) form of dis... more Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is an ‘unabashedly normative’ (Van Dijk, 1993: 253) form of discourse analysis. However, Hammersley (1997) criticises CDA for its lack of theoretical rigour, claiming that CD Analysts do not make clear enough the theoretical justification for any normative academic agenda. Having examined four theoretical bases for normative academic work – Orthodox Marxism, Frankfurt School Marxism, Decisionism and Habermasian discourse ethics – he concludes that all four outlooks prove insufficient to justify this work.
Contrary to Hammersley (1997), Van Dijk (2006) has suggested that Habermasian discourse ethics might provide good theoretical foundations for CDA. Following Van Dijk (2006), in this paper I describe a theoretical framework that draws on Habermas’ (1984) ‘universal pragmatics’, Ryan’s (1993) ‘centred’ possible worlds theory and text world theory (see Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007). I implement this framework by analysing a section of the third Party leader debate of the 2010 British general election.
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I examine representations of the markets in an op-ed article entitled Who’s the Man with the Plan... more I examine representations of the markets in an op-ed article entitled Who’s the Man with the Plan Now?, published in the Guardian on the 8th October, 2008. October, 2008, was a turbulent time for the British economy. It saw the massive re-capitalisation of the British financial sector and a collapse of the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares. Some economists and journalists argued this constituted the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929, further suggesting it signalled a “crisis in capitalism”. Ignoring the truth or falsity of these claims, the fact that they were made at all in the mainstream news media suggests the British socio-economic order suffered from a brief ‘legitimation crisis’ (Habermas, 1976).
In light of these events, I examine some of the ways in which conventional conceptualisations of the economy, specifically the metaphorical personification of the markets, are re-oriented in an attempt to provide a dissident critique of the economic status-quo in Who’s the Man with the Plan Now?. By re-representing the markets as hostile “invaders”, the writer, Jonathan Rutherford, collapses the conceptual distinction between personified markets (conventionally represented as vulnerable) and market traders and investors (conventionally represented as strong, socio-economic elites). As such, Rutherford’s article provides a partial repudiation of the existing economic order.
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PhD Thesis
Building on Werth’s (1994) notion of ‘megametaphor’, in this thesis I examine the discourse-level... more Building on Werth’s (1994) notion of ‘megametaphor’, in this thesis I examine the discourse-level conceptual effects of metaphor in five op-ed articles about the 2008 British financial crisis. I use these analyses to offer three contributions to debates in metaphor studies. Firstly, I attempt to offer a more detailed specification of megametaphor. I argue that whilst megametaphor is a useful concept to start an investigation of discourse-level metaphoric conceptual effects, Werth (1994) does not sufficiently differentiate it from the notion of ‘conceptual metaphor’ (see Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). I define megametaphors as text-driven discourse-level conceptual structures comprised of multiple metaphors. Secondly, I argue that megametaphors are situated within the broader cognitive environments generated in the minds of discourse participants as they take part in a discourse. Analysts therefore have to account for the relationship between megametaphors and the conceptual contexts in which they appear. I argue that Text World Theory (see Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) provides the best account of this conceptual context, and suggest that the text-world structures created in the minds of readers scaffolds the integration of individual clause-level metaphors into megametaphors. Finally, drawing on Werth’s (1977, 1994) notion of ‘double-vision’, Steen’s (2008, 2011a, 2011b) notion of ‘deliberate metaphor’ and Stockwell’s (2009) attention-resonance model, I propose a framework for describing the ways in which megametaphors ‘texture’ (Stockwell, 2009) the text-worlds in which they are situated.
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the media have started to create the ‘backstage’ of politics through fiction films and soap operas, in order to satisfy a widespread desire among audiences: the urge to know more about how decisions are taken, how politicians live, and what their everyday life might consist of.
(Wodak, 2009: 163)
Fictional discourse is being used to represent, speculate about and even sensationalise political processes normally hidden from “outsiders”.
In this chapter, I argue that such speculation is not just a feature of films and soap operas, but the discourse of media pundits, members of the public and even other politicians. Indeed, both professional journalists and lay audience members often make inferences about the “real” (i.e. backstage) motivations, aims and ambitions of politicians based on the oratorical performances they hear and see on their radios and televisions. Reconstructing backstage processes from front stage performances is thus integral to the way in which professional and lay audiences participate in and consequently “do” politics. For analysts of political discourse, it is therefore important that these reception-side, reconstructive processes are properly understood.
Using journalistic responses to a political speech by the British politician, Ed Miliband, I offer an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for describing how audiences construct a backstage context for the political discourses in which they participate. The discursive practices associated with the reception of political discourse have been the subject of less sustained research in discourse analysis. I consequently turn to two areas of work in social and cognitive psychology for theoretical inspiration. The first, Theory of Mind (ToM, see, for example, Baron-Cohen, 1995; Premack and Woodruff, 1978), has been productively employed by researchers in cognitive stylistics to explain how readers make inferences about the cognitive and emotional states of fictional characters (Nuttall, 2015; Whiteley, 2011; Zunshine, 2003), narrators (Palmer, 2004) and authors (Stockwell, 2016). Our ToM allows us to “read off” cognitive states from behavioural cues and thereby engage in small feats of mind reading (or ‘mind modelling’, c.f. Stockwell, 2009: 140) on a regular basis. I combine ideas from ToM with ‘attribution theory’ – a branch of social psychology which exams how people attribute blame and causality in social situations (see Fiske and Taylor, 1991, for an overview) – to account for how audiences model the minds of politicians to make sense of their front stage linguistic behaviour. I argue that this mind modelling constitutes a form of speculation about the backstage context in which politics is performed.
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Fiske, S. & Taylor, S. (1991) Social Cognition. New York: McGraw-Hill
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin
Nuttall, L. (2015) ‘Attributing minds to vampire sin Richard Matheson’s I am Legend’. Language and Literature. 24(1): 23-39
Palmer, A. (2004) Fictional Minds. London; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978) ‘Does a chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 1(4): 515-526
Stockwell, P. (2016) ‘The texture of authorial intention’. In Gavins, J. & Lahey, E. (eds) World Building: Discourse in the Mind. London: Bloomsbury
Stockwell, P. (2009) Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Whiteley, S. (2011) ‘Text World Theory, real readers and emotional responses to The Remains of the Day’. Language and Literature. 20(1): 23-42
Wodak, R. (2009) The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. London: Palgrave
Zunshine, L. (2003) ‘Theory of mind and experimental representations of fictional consciousness’. Narrative. 11: 270-91
Whilst analysts have tended to focus on coherence in metaphor clusters, there is relatively little investigation of single texts that contain a variety of different conceptual metaphors for the same thing. However, Koller (2005: 205) has noted that the hybrid use of disparate or conflicting metaphors in a single text can often signify ‘struggles over conceptualisation’.
I propose a text-world approach to charting this dialogical struggle over conceptualisations, using it to examine the disparate metaphors for the economy appearing in a selection of op-ed articles on the 2008 British financial crisis. I argue that the text-world architectures of each text scaffold the integration of different conceptual metaphors into larger megametaphors (see Werth, 1994). As writers shift between their own or competing ideological perspectives of the British economic crisis, they switch between disparate megametaphorical conceptions of the economy. I further suggest that the use of conflicting megametaphors, grounded in separate text-worlds, is a strategy for engaging with, and, in the texts discussed, ultimately discrediting the explanations of the economic crisis offered by rival news commentators, politicians and analysts.
Conference Organisation and CFPs.
Talks
In Text World Theory, CG is defined as ‘backgrounded information… guaranteed in the text world of the discourse (whatever its status in the speech event in which the discourse is formulated) (Werth, 1993: 41). The parenthetical caveat allows for the creation of a range of non-actual text-worlds. In the case of political discourse, audiences often listen to speeches or read newspaper articles premised on background knowledge with which they do not agree. To create coherent text-world representations of the discourse, resistant readers must ‘model the minds’ (Stockwell, 2009: 140) of authors by constructing an idealised common ground – the knowledge-set upon which audiences construct a model of the world-according-to-the-speaker. Mind modelling the author is thus a fundamental aspect of world-building.
I use data collected from a read aloud experiment to evidence and exemplify this argument. Participants were asked to read a speech by the British Home Secretary, Theresa May MP, about immigration. They were shown one paragraph at a time and asked to provide commentary in a box under each. There were 16 participants and 16 paragraphs, yielding a corpus of 256 comments.
As others have noted (for example, Steen, 2014), this use of the text as evidence for the cognitive processes involved in conceptualisation moves in the opposite direction to work Stylistics. This research is more often geared toward an explanation of the attenuated and fine-grained linguistic analysis of literary and rhetorical effects.
Using Text World Theory (c.f. Gavins, 2007, Werth, 1994, 1999), particularly Werth’s (1994) notion of megametaphor, I investigate the ways in which researchers might talk about the stylistics of metaphor in a way that is sensitive to – and that encompasses – its cognitive dimensions. The aim of the paper is to sketch the beginnings of a situated Cognitive Stylistic framework for analysing the rhetorical and literary effects of figurative language.
Contrary to Hammersley (1997), Van Dijk (2006) has suggested that Habermasian discourse ethics might provide good theoretical foundations for CDA. Following Van Dijk (2006), in this paper I describe a theoretical framework that draws on Habermas’ (1984) ‘universal pragmatics’, Ryan’s (1993) ‘centred’ possible worlds theory and text world theory (see Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007). I implement this framework by analysing a section of the third Party leader debate of the 2010 British general election.
In light of these events, I examine some of the ways in which conventional conceptualisations of the economy, specifically the metaphorical personification of the markets, are re-oriented in an attempt to provide a dissident critique of the economic status-quo in Who’s the Man with the Plan Now?. By re-representing the markets as hostile “invaders”, the writer, Jonathan Rutherford, collapses the conceptual distinction between personified markets (conventionally represented as vulnerable) and market traders and investors (conventionally represented as strong, socio-economic elites). As such, Rutherford’s article provides a partial repudiation of the existing economic order.
PhD Thesis
the media have started to create the ‘backstage’ of politics through fiction films and soap operas, in order to satisfy a widespread desire among audiences: the urge to know more about how decisions are taken, how politicians live, and what their everyday life might consist of.
(Wodak, 2009: 163)
Fictional discourse is being used to represent, speculate about and even sensationalise political processes normally hidden from “outsiders”.
In this chapter, I argue that such speculation is not just a feature of films and soap operas, but the discourse of media pundits, members of the public and even other politicians. Indeed, both professional journalists and lay audience members often make inferences about the “real” (i.e. backstage) motivations, aims and ambitions of politicians based on the oratorical performances they hear and see on their radios and televisions. Reconstructing backstage processes from front stage performances is thus integral to the way in which professional and lay audiences participate in and consequently “do” politics. For analysts of political discourse, it is therefore important that these reception-side, reconstructive processes are properly understood.
Using journalistic responses to a political speech by the British politician, Ed Miliband, I offer an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for describing how audiences construct a backstage context for the political discourses in which they participate. The discursive practices associated with the reception of political discourse have been the subject of less sustained research in discourse analysis. I consequently turn to two areas of work in social and cognitive psychology for theoretical inspiration. The first, Theory of Mind (ToM, see, for example, Baron-Cohen, 1995; Premack and Woodruff, 1978), has been productively employed by researchers in cognitive stylistics to explain how readers make inferences about the cognitive and emotional states of fictional characters (Nuttall, 2015; Whiteley, 2011; Zunshine, 2003), narrators (Palmer, 2004) and authors (Stockwell, 2016). Our ToM allows us to “read off” cognitive states from behavioural cues and thereby engage in small feats of mind reading (or ‘mind modelling’, c.f. Stockwell, 2009: 140) on a regular basis. I combine ideas from ToM with ‘attribution theory’ – a branch of social psychology which exams how people attribute blame and causality in social situations (see Fiske and Taylor, 1991, for an overview) – to account for how audiences model the minds of politicians to make sense of their front stage linguistic behaviour. I argue that this mind modelling constitutes a form of speculation about the backstage context in which politics is performed.
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995) Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Fiske, S. & Taylor, S. (1991) Social Cognition. New York: McGraw-Hill
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin
Nuttall, L. (2015) ‘Attributing minds to vampire sin Richard Matheson’s I am Legend’. Language and Literature. 24(1): 23-39
Palmer, A. (2004) Fictional Minds. London; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978) ‘Does a chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 1(4): 515-526
Stockwell, P. (2016) ‘The texture of authorial intention’. In Gavins, J. & Lahey, E. (eds) World Building: Discourse in the Mind. London: Bloomsbury
Stockwell, P. (2009) Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Whiteley, S. (2011) ‘Text World Theory, real readers and emotional responses to The Remains of the Day’. Language and Literature. 20(1): 23-42
Wodak, R. (2009) The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual. London: Palgrave
Zunshine, L. (2003) ‘Theory of mind and experimental representations of fictional consciousness’. Narrative. 11: 270-91
Whilst analysts have tended to focus on coherence in metaphor clusters, there is relatively little investigation of single texts that contain a variety of different conceptual metaphors for the same thing. However, Koller (2005: 205) has noted that the hybrid use of disparate or conflicting metaphors in a single text can often signify ‘struggles over conceptualisation’.
I propose a text-world approach to charting this dialogical struggle over conceptualisations, using it to examine the disparate metaphors for the economy appearing in a selection of op-ed articles on the 2008 British financial crisis. I argue that the text-world architectures of each text scaffold the integration of different conceptual metaphors into larger megametaphors (see Werth, 1994). As writers shift between their own or competing ideological perspectives of the British economic crisis, they switch between disparate megametaphorical conceptions of the economy. I further suggest that the use of conflicting megametaphors, grounded in separate text-worlds, is a strategy for engaging with, and, in the texts discussed, ultimately discrediting the explanations of the economic crisis offered by rival news commentators, politicians and analysts.
In Text World Theory, CG is defined as ‘backgrounded information… guaranteed in the text world of the discourse (whatever its status in the speech event in which the discourse is formulated) (Werth, 1993: 41). The parenthetical caveat allows for the creation of a range of non-actual text-worlds. In the case of political discourse, audiences often listen to speeches or read newspaper articles premised on background knowledge with which they do not agree. To create coherent text-world representations of the discourse, resistant readers must ‘model the minds’ (Stockwell, 2009: 140) of authors by constructing an idealised common ground – the knowledge-set upon which audiences construct a model of the world-according-to-the-speaker. Mind modelling the author is thus a fundamental aspect of world-building.
I use data collected from a read aloud experiment to evidence and exemplify this argument. Participants were asked to read a speech by the British Home Secretary, Theresa May MP, about immigration. They were shown one paragraph at a time and asked to provide commentary in a box under each. There were 16 participants and 16 paragraphs, yielding a corpus of 256 comments.
As others have noted (for example, Steen, 2014), this use of the text as evidence for the cognitive processes involved in conceptualisation moves in the opposite direction to work Stylistics. This research is more often geared toward an explanation of the attenuated and fine-grained linguistic analysis of literary and rhetorical effects.
Using Text World Theory (c.f. Gavins, 2007, Werth, 1994, 1999), particularly Werth’s (1994) notion of megametaphor, I investigate the ways in which researchers might talk about the stylistics of metaphor in a way that is sensitive to – and that encompasses – its cognitive dimensions. The aim of the paper is to sketch the beginnings of a situated Cognitive Stylistic framework for analysing the rhetorical and literary effects of figurative language.
Contrary to Hammersley (1997), Van Dijk (2006) has suggested that Habermasian discourse ethics might provide good theoretical foundations for CDA. Following Van Dijk (2006), in this paper I describe a theoretical framework that draws on Habermas’ (1984) ‘universal pragmatics’, Ryan’s (1993) ‘centred’ possible worlds theory and text world theory (see Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007). I implement this framework by analysing a section of the third Party leader debate of the 2010 British general election.
In light of these events, I examine some of the ways in which conventional conceptualisations of the economy, specifically the metaphorical personification of the markets, are re-oriented in an attempt to provide a dissident critique of the economic status-quo in Who’s the Man with the Plan Now?. By re-representing the markets as hostile “invaders”, the writer, Jonathan Rutherford, collapses the conceptual distinction between personified markets (conventionally represented as vulnerable) and market traders and investors (conventionally represented as strong, socio-economic elites). As such, Rutherford’s article provides a partial repudiation of the existing economic order.