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While subscribing to the general view that all meaning is necessarily contextual, IRP welcomes research reflecting different, often conflicting, views of pragmatics. It is a forum for papers that analyze discourse in its many instantiations (spoken, written; institutional, business, media etc.) through a pragmatic lens, but also for those which consider pragmatics itself a separate discipline defined by specific objects of investigation (deixis, implicature, etc.). The confrontation is supposed to establish how much explanatory power in pragmatics rests in its interdisciplinary and semiotics-based variations, as opposed to self-contained methodologies with precisely delineated scope of application. Thus, in the long run, the aim of IRP will be to maintain a vigorous debate leading to crystallization of the core concept of pragmatics, and to evaluation of its descriptive and interpretive capacity.
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The goal of this paper is to show how proximization theory, a recent cognitive-pragmatic model of crisis and threat construction, can be applied in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). It is argued that the rapidly growing, intergeneric field of CDS is in need of new, interdisciplinary methodologies that will allow it to account for an increasingly broader spectrum of discourses, genres and thematic domains. Thus, proximization theory is used as a candidate methodological tool to handle three sample discourses—health, environment, modern technology—with a view to further applications. The results seem promising: the theory elucidates well the key features of public discourses within the CDS scope, for instance legitimization patterns in policy communication. Equally promising seem the prospects for proximization theory itself to continue to draw empirically from the expanding CDS territory.
Abstract
The present paper explores the current nexus between Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), focusing on theories of conceptual positioning, distancing and perspective-taking in discourse space. It assesses the strengths, limitations, and prospects for further operationalization of positioning as a valid methodology in CDA, and political discourse studies in particular. In the first part, I review the cognitive models of positioning that have made the most significant contribution to CDA. Discussing Deictic Space Theory and Text World Theory, among others, I argue that these models reveal further theoretical potential which has not been exploited yet. While they offer a comprehensive and plausible account of how representations and ideologically charged worldviews are established, they fail to deliver a pragmatic explanation of how addressees are made to establish a worldview, in the service of speaker’s goals. The second part of the paper outlines Proximization Theory, a discursive model of crisis and conflict construction in political discourse. I argue that, unlike the other models, it fully captures the complex geopolitical and ideological positioning in political discourse space, providing a viable handle on the dynamics of conflict between the opposing ideologies of the space.
Abstract
This short paper makes a tentative attempt to capture the most salient of persuasion strategies engaged in the construction of leadership in three different yet apparently interrelated domains of public life and public policy, political communication, management/business discourse, and academic communication. It explores the cognitive underpinnings, as well as linguistic realizations, of such concepts/phenomena/mechanisms as consistency-building, source-tagging, forced conceptualizations by metaphor, and discursive neutralization of the cheater detection module in the discourse addressee. A preliminary conclusion from the analysis of these mechanisms is that the three discourses under investigation reveal striking conceptual similarities with regard to the main strategies of credibility-building and enactment of leadership. At the same time, they reveal differences at the linguistic level, i.e. regarding the types of lexical choices applied to realize a given strategy.