Abstract
Within the framework of Critical Discourse Studies, the orthodox reductionist views on language have been superseded by a much more flexible and manifold conceptualization of meaning-making in language use. The latter is, therefore, seen as a highly complex social practice which is a product of, among many other things, the cultural, historical and political conditions in a given “epistemic community”. One façade of this rather broad topic is to be probed in this book, which aims to better fathom the seemingly dyadic interchange between ideology and language. The rationale that underpins my approach is built upon the belief that language is a form of socio-cognitive behaviour which, in Wittgenstein’s words, “pictures” the realities of the world out there.
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- 1.
See Wodak and Meyer (2009) for a detailed literature review on CDA , its genesis, development, goals and agenda.
- 2.
Many different labels were used by politicians, the media and academics to refer to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq . Each given label reflected, to some extent, a specific ideological stance in relation to the war. “Iraqi Freedom Operation” reverberated in the US official documents, army sources and rhetoric of politicians. The Iraq War and the Second Gulf War were also frequently used. Yet, other anti-war proponents preferred the phrase “War on Iraq” to emphasize that the military act was aggressive and illegal.
- 3.
The concept of mental models and thus the role of knowledge, as prescribed by the socio-cognitive model of discourse analysis, are explained in some detail in the third chapter.
- 4.
One of the most important remarks that should be highlighted is the emphasis on the cross-disciplinary nature of method and theory in CDS —not only within the domain of traditional disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, as this intersection might extend to newborn arenas of research that are much more scientifically oriented and less speculative, such as the empirically based logic of cognitive psychology.
- 5.
I used the latest version of IRaMuTeQ and Lexico3, which are high-performance software tools for data mining and textual analysis.
- 6.
The word-frequency illustrations of each of these newspapers clearly show the centrality of Iraq as a main theme in the texts retrieved.
- 7.
For more information about the circulation and readership estimates of the British newspapers and other related details, check the official website of the Audit Bureau of Circulation (UK): abc.org.uk
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Douifi, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Language and the Complex of Ideology. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76547-1_1
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