Cognitive Discourse Analysis

An introduction to the methodology of cognitive discourse analysis, focusing on eight key areas, from attention to cognitive strategies.

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.

"There are two main ways in which language is seen as a representation of thought. Either you can think of the system of language in a static way, or you can think of how the system is used by speakers to express their thoughts, and what happens in their minds as they do so. Looking at the system itself, some approaches primarily explore how linguistic structure represents cognitive structure; specific aspects of the linguistic system are identified as expressing specific aspects of thought"--

`For those already familiar with discursive work it will be a joy - Edwards writes with enormous clarity and insight. For psychologists whose work involves an understanding of the relations between language and cognition this book will be essential reading.... This is a demanding book that will repay close attention. It can also be dipped into as a resource for the brilliant reworkings of traditional psychological topic areas, such as emotion, language, cognition, categories, AI, narrative, scripts and developmental psychology. If you want a glimpse into the future of psychology, get this book - the end of cognitivism starts here' - History and Philosophy of Psychology The central project of this mult

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.

While there is a growing body of psycholinguistic experimental research on mappings between language and vision on a word and sentence level, there are almost no studies on how speakers perceive, conceptualise and spontaneously describe a complex visual scene on higher levels of discourse. This book explores the relationship between language, eye movements and cognition, and brings together discourse analysis with cognitively oriented behavioral research. Based on the analysis of data drawn from spoken descriptive discourse, spontaneous conversation, and experimental investigations, this work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language, vision and mental imagery. Verbal and visual data, synchronised and correlated by means of a multimodal scoring method, are used as two windows to the mind to show how language and vision, in concert, can elucidate covert mental processes.

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.

This text offers a new way forward for highlighting language manipulation on behalf of lay-readers as well as for enhancing the interpretative authority of the analyst. It accomplishes this through the innovation of a model of lay-reader processing. The model is an original synthesis of elements from four contemporary cognitive frameworks - connectionism, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistic evidence on inference generation, relevance theory.