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Bringing concepts from cognitive linguistics into the analysis of policies and the political

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Abstract

The articles in this special issue all seek to highlight the ways in which concepts from linguistics can enlighten analyses of policies and the political. In this commentary, I seek to situate some of the central concepts that have been employed in terms of their treatment in cognitive linguistics. The first part of this commentary focuses on metaphor — a construct that receives explicit analysis in these works as it is a fundamental tool we use for thinking about and expressing abstract concepts. The discussion then turns to a topic underpinning all of these studies, even while remaining implicit in them, namely metonymy: the mention of a part to stand for a whole, a whole for a part, and other relations of association. This section considers the important role of metonymy in providing a compact means for politicians, policy-makers, and/or average citizens to make reference to, and reason about, complex topics. At the same time, metonymy also carries the risk of reflecting, or inducing, unwarranted logical inferences. The third topic taken up here is categories; key issues considered are the variety of structures that categories can manifest and how these structures are pertinent in different ways in differing contexts, including classical categories that metaphorically function like containers, vs prototype categories with fuzzy boundaries. Employing these approaches in the analysis of policies and the political therefore involves not only a linguistic turn, but also a cognitive one.

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Notes

  1. The convention from cognitive linguistics, of noting proposed conceptual metaphors in the form TARGET DOMAIN AS SOU in small capital letters, will be followed here.

  2. The convention in cognitive linguistics is to use small capital letters to denote image schemas as well as conceptual metaphors.

  3. Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘Gorilla’, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/239295/gorilla (accessed 12 February, 2009).

  4. I am grateful to Dvora Yanow for bringing this point to my attention.

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Acknowledgements

The article was drafted while I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2009–2010) and on leave from the Vrije Universiteit. I am very grateful to both for providing this research support. Thanks to Dvora Yanow for her detailed comments on previous versions and to Patrick Jackson for his editorial suggestions. Some of the initial ideas in this article were presented at a meeting of the International Studies Association (New York, February 2009).

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  1. Department of Language and Communication, Faculteit der Letteren/Faculty of Arts, Vrije Universiteit (VU)/Free University, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam, 1081HV, The Netherlands

    Alan Cienki

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Cienki, A. Bringing concepts from cognitive linguistics into the analysis of policies and the political. J Int Relat Dev 16, 294–310 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.24

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