16.1699, Review: Politics of Lang/Discourse: Chilton (2004)

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Subject: 16.1699, Review: Politics of Lang/Discourse: Chilton (2004)

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1)
Date: 28-May-2005
From: Susana Sotillo < sotillos at mail.montclair.edu >
Subject: Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 18:32:05
From: Susana Sotillo < sotillos at mail.montclair.edu >
Subject: Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice 
 

AUTHOR: Chilton, Paul
TITLE: Analysing Political Discourse
SUBTITLE: Theory and Practice 
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2545.html


Susana M. Sotillo, Department of Linguistics, Montclair State University, USA

SUMMARY 

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to political discourse 
analysis and presents a new model for the study of language and politics 
that rests on the intersection of several deictic dimensions. The author 
puts forth a theoretical framework based on a cognitivist perspective, 
which claims that social interaction is based on the actions of 
individuals, and that these individuals are primarily complex neural 
beings. He questions the current explanation of political discourse in 
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the actions of some social group or 
elite that exploits or controls language in order to preserve its own 
power. Instead, Chilton aims for a theory of language and politics that 
rests on the intersection of three axes: space, time, and modality. The 
book is divided into three sections. Part I presents the proposed 
theoretical framework. Parts II and III include detailed analyses of 
samples of political text and talk, and Part IV offers concluding thoughts 
concerning the need for a theory of language and politics. The book 
includes 11 chapters (205 pages of text), an appendix, notes on each 
chapter, a bibliography, and name and subject indexes.

SYNOPSIS

The first chapter, Politics and Language, explores the linguistic, 
discursive, and communicative dimensions of politics drawing in part on 
Aristotle's view of humans as political creatures with a unique capacity 
for speech. The author speculates about the possible connection between 
the linguistic and the political in light of the view, widely accepted in 
linguistics, that the human capacity for language is genetically based, 
though primarily triggered through social interaction. Chilton explores 
the possibility that language might have evolved to perform social 
functions, which would correspond to   the "political", or that it evolved 
primarily by a random mutation. He summarizes the findings of numerous 
scholars who have investigated the role of language in the construction 
(or destruction) of nation-states, and touches upon the current debate on 
the rights of linguistic minorities and cultural groups (see Foster, 1980.)

In chapter two, Language and Politics, Chilton examines the nature of 
language, (subscript L), particular languages, (subscript l), and the use 
of language in relation to politics, (subscript l/u). He discusses the re-
emergence of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the development of new 
methods of investigation grounded in cognitive science, computational 
linguistics, archeology, sociology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Chilton 
also presents the three major approaches to the evolution of language: the 
species-specific ability for language capacity exemplified by Chomskyan 
linguistics; the social intelligence language module view (e.g., Humphrey 
1976, Dunbar, 1993, Mithen, 1996); and the "Machiavellian" behavior view 
which presumes that early human individuals sought to developed strategies 
to maximize individual advantages through reciprocal altruism. 

In seeking answers to questions related to the evolutionary advantage 
afforded by language, Chilton examines the notions of representation and 
meta-representation, or the ability humans possess of being able to 
communicate about things feasible, unfeasible, past, future, real, unreal, 
citing work by Sperber (2000), Gärdenfors (2002), and Hockett (1960). This 
leads him to speculate on the possibility of the co-evolution of language 
and politics. Grice's 'cooperative Principle (CP), which underlies human 
communication and is regarded as reciprocal altruism, as well as Sperber 
and Wilson's (1986) relevance theory, are discussed in detail. He examines 
truthfulness (Grice's maxim of quality), the logical structure of human 
cooperation as argued by Cosmides and Tooby (1989), and the species-
specific ability to meta-represent. 

The last section includes a lengthy discussion of Chomskyan linguistics, 
specifically the principle of generative creativity. Chilton seeks to 
establish a link between Chomsky's linguistics, where grammar is 
understood as autonomous syntax based on Cartesian formalist philosophy 
(i.e., disembodied and free of semantic and pragmatic considerations), and 
his anarchist-socialist political views. In Chomskyan political 
philosophy, rule by a government is inherently oppressive, and Capitalism 
is a perversion of universal human nature (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 
478).

Chilton makes an argument for cognitive freedom claiming that 
the 'generative creativity' of language allows individuals to overcome the 
so-called Whorfian constraint. In discussing the ideal of free 
communication, he cites the work of critical social theorist Jürgen 
Habermas who posits that communication is distorted by issues of power and 
socio-political interests, but that it is possible in principle to achieve 
honest normal social exchange. In other words, the communicative power of 
reason, or reason freed from purposive bias, allows humans to reach true 
enlightenment through interaction (see Myerson, 1994). 

Interaction, the organizing theme of chapter three, is examined in 
relation to its political dimension. Chilton discusses Austin's (1962) and 
Searle's (1969) classical speech act theory and examines the felicity 
conditions and CP in relation to a political framework. The mechanisms for 
flouting the maxims and the implied pragmatic meaning or implicatures are 
also discussed within the context of political interaction as in 
particular institutionalized contexts such as Parliamentary debates. 

In a micro-analysis of political interaction, Chilton utilizes notational 
conventions from conversation analysis developed by Schegloff (1972, 1979) 
and Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) that reveal fine details of 
face-to-face (F2F) interaction. Following a brief discussion of the 
strategic use of language, the author focuses on the Habermasian 
epistemological framework and its four validity claims: understandability, 
truth, sincerity in speech, and rightness or authority in performing a 
particular speech act. Habermas's universal pragmatics model asserts that 
its claims provide a logical explanation for the mechanism of human 
communication, and that distorted communication can be detected in 
interaction. 

Concerning strategic uses of language in political discourse, the author 
puts forth the following strategic functions (Chilton and Schäffner, 
1997): coercion, legitimization and delegitimization, and representation 
and misrepresentation. He claims that representation and misrepresentation 
in political discourse are directly related to Grice's maxims of quantity, 
quality, and manner, and Habermas's validity claims of truth and 
truthfulness. Coercion strategies are connected to some of Habermas's 
rightness or "Richtigkeit" claim. 

Also, the strategies of legitimization and delegitimization are linked to 
Brown and Levinson's (1987) concepts of face-threatening acts, which are 
based on Goffman's (1967) ideas of positive face and negative face. Thus 
acts of negative other-presentation such as scapegoating, marginalizing, 
or derogating constitute delegitimization, whereas legitimization, usually 
oriented to the self, encompasses positive self-presentation or acts of 
self-praise, self-justification, and self-identification with a power 
source or authority figure.

Chapter four deals with the way representations of the world are 
communicated in political interaction. Semantics and pragmatics, or the 
nature of meaning and meaning as a function of context, are discussed in 
relation to the study of language and politics. Chilton investigates how 
mental representations of reality are constructed during the process of 
interaction in political discourse, and discusses cognitive approaches to 
linguistics in processing discourse in the work of van Dijk (1990, 2002) 
and van Dijk and Kintsch (1983). This approach explains how knowledge of 
politics and political ideologies involves storage in long-term memory, 
which can be either personal memory or social memory, and how short-term 
memory deals primarily with processes of discourse production and 
understanding. 

The term 'frame' is introduced and defined as a theoretical construct 
related to the conceptualization of situation types and their expression 
in language. He also discusses conceptual metaphor, an important element 
of political rhetoric, which "allows conventional mental imagery from 
sensorimotor domains to be used for domains of subjective experience" 
(Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 45). Metaphorical mappings are also discussed 
as complex bundles of meaning and frame representations that consist of 
accumulated cultural knowledge. 

In doing practical analyses of text and talk, Chilton uses a theoretical 
framework that allows him to make propositional representations consisting 
of arguments (e.g., noun phrases), predicates (e.g., verbs, adjectives, 
and prepositional phrases), and adjuncts, which specify location, time, 
and manner. Citing Dowty (1991), Chilton explains that the thematic roles 
of arguments have to be understood as clusters of entailments about the 
predicate, and that traditional roles (e.g., agent, source, patient, 
experiencer, goal) must be linked to one of two prototypical categories: 
prototypical agent (P-Agent) and prototypical patient (P-Patient). The 
semantic phenomenon of presupposition is explained as being triggered by 
syntactic and lexical structures. He displays the propositional 
representations (Table 4.1) of unpacked sentences from a transcript of a 
speech given in 1999 by former President Clinton to justify the use of air 
strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in alliance with 
NATO. Serbian forces are represented as responsible agents of brutality 
and Kosovo civilians and insurgents as victims of brutality in Kosovo. 

Chilton also shows how indexical expressions are used as linguistic 
resources to relate to a variety of situational features, and elaborates 
on spatial, temporal, and social deixis since these relate to elements of 
political discourse. Thus political actors are situated in relation to a 
particular time, place, and social group. In this three-dimensional model, 
the deictic center (e.g., the Self/I/or we) constitutes the source or 
origin of the three dimensions of deixis. Clinton's 1999 speech is mapped 
onto a three-dimensional deixis. Events, nations, agents, and patients are 
located in relation to the Self or speaker. Time or the here/now is also 
at the center, and in this type of political speech, historical periods 
are either close or remote to the source. Along the m axis, Chilton 
describes close connections between epistemic modality (involving degrees 
of certainty) and deontic modality (related to permission and obligation), 
commonly regarded as scales. 

More complexity is added to the proposed dimensions of deixis by 
suggesting that social groups are conceptualized metaphorically on the 
basis of container and center-periphery image schemata. A rightness-
wrongness scale along the m axis is added, showing primarily modal verbs 
(will, must, should, ought, etc.) though other linguistic expressions 
could easily be used. Chilton's argument is that individuals mentally 
processing political speeches will locate arguments and predicates in 
relation to the three axes of space, time, and modality. He also brings up 
the notion of presumptions (implicit or presumed claims) present in 
political discourse.

In Part II, the Domestic Arena, Chilton examines the micro-structure of 
the media interview (chapter five). Margaret Beckett, Labour MP and Leader 
of the House of Commons (HC) is interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC Radio 
in June 2001. Using conventions from conversation analysis, Chilton 
explains how participants are aware of recent political history, social 
structures, and customs of discourse beyond the context of the local 
interview. For example, Beckett's comments about William Hague, the 
Conservative Party leader, reveal her concern with the impact of his 
speech on voters, since they may decide not to vote thus hurting the 
Labour party. The interaction in this media interview shows how the ideal 
question-answer format is in fact disrupted by Humphrys' frequent 
interruptions of Beckett's responses, and her own challenges and 
interruptions of the interviewer's deontic (rightness) frames. 

Propositions and presumptions are closely examined in the Humphrys-Beckett 
interview. The presumed knowledge of political institutions, party system, 
and electoral processes are displayed in Table 5.1. Political reasoning 
using conditional propositions (knowledge of cause and effect) is also 
analyzed in a separate table (5.2), illustrating the embedding of 
propositions in interview talk (e.g., argument-P-Agent, predicate 
relation, action, etc., Argument 2-P-Patient, adjunct/conjunct). Chilton 
argues that this type of micro-analysis shows how Grice's CP and the 
conversational maxims are preserved in this type of political text and 
talk. The analysis also shows how Humphrys, the interviewer, uses frames 
of beliefs about democracy and overt deontic expressions such as 'be 
allowed,' to lead Beckett into logical dilemmas that force her to 
reformulate her explanation of 'non-voting as a rejection of the 
government' by using analogy, in particular the voting patterns of US 
presidential elections. 

The characteristics of a particular genre of democratic discourse, 
Parliamentary language, are examined in chapter six. Following an 
historical account of institutional rules, turn-taking rules, and 
mechanisms for regulating this genre, Chilton describes what happens in 
parliamentary question time by examining repairs in a transcript of a 
parliamentary debate in the HC, 7 July 1999. A new MP, Laxton, puts 
questions that are really statements until the opposition MPs interrupt 
following Laxton's falling intonation at the end of speech segment, which 
enables the Speaker to use the imperative, 'put your question now please' 
as a means of controlling the syntactic form and pragmatic force of the 
MP's utterances. Prime Minister Blair's response to Laxton's requests 
concerning a community hospital focuses on the order of salience and he 
repeats the word 'agree' twice and the phrase 'he's right' three times to 
elicit a chorus of approval from Labour MPs. Chilton characterizes this 
activity as a form of bonding as well as bounding behavior among members. 
Laxton appears to be seeking public commitment from the current government 
and approval from his peers and constituents through self-advertising via 
this televised performance. The parliamentary debate analyzed shows that 
in this type of political discourse one has to demonstrate some basic 
mastery of appropriate language and political behavior. 

Next, Chilton analyzes parliamentary exchanges between seasoned leaders 
such as Prime Minister Tony Blair and opposition leader MP William Hague. 
At one point Hague is criticizing the waiting time for access to health 
services using interrogatives, presuppositions, and hand gestures to 
accompany rising-falling intonation contours, which Chilton interprets as 
meaning challenges since prosodic features often accompanied by gestures 
are part of the parliamentary performance. Blair interrupts to save face 
and quickly asserts that waiting time has decreased. After Blair seats 
himself, Hague accuses him of evasion and makes reference to the poor 
conditions under which junior doctors labor, but makes a slip of the 
tongue when referring to the head of the British Medical Association using 
the acronym MBA instead of BMA, which prompts the MPs to interrupt with 
laughter since Hague has not mentally registered his slip. He then 
corrects himself after what is seen as other-initiated self-repair. Hague 
uses gestures and manipulates vocalization in order to mitigate the 
adversarial effect of a derisive interruption, and following the 
intervention of Madam Speaker, attempts to reassert verbal control by 
eventually returning to the question of the number of people waiting to 
see a doctor. 

Chilton's close examination of repairs when parliamentary rules are 
transgressed reveals that they are often used as mechanisms for 
initiation, bonding, and bounding. His detailed analysis of parliamentary 
discourse demonstrates how verbal and political behavior are interwoven, 
and although form is important, performance is crucial in this context.

The theme of foreigners as a threatening category is discussed in chapter 
seven. Using a portion of Enoch Powell's 1968 'Rivers of Blood' speech, 
Chilton illustrates the strategic functions utilized to bring about 
specific emotive effects. For example, when Powell states that "Whole 
areas, towns and parts of towns across England ... will be occupied by 
sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population..." it brings 
up the fear of domination and invasion by immigrant hordes in the minds of 
native-born (white) English citizens. He shows that the various 
legitimizing/delegitimizing strategies used by Powell cluster around 
claims of moral authority, common moral ground, and superior rationality 
(his). Hearers are left to infer that Powell's political opponents are 
neither moral nor rational with respect to the issue of immigration. 
Container and fluid schema are also used when referring to the English 
nation and family. In the propositional structure of Powell's 'Rivers of 
Blood' speech, immigrants are depicted as social agents whose impact 
negatively affects the welfare of the existing native population -- the 
patients or victims at the receiving end of actions, perceptions, and 
feelings. Presupposed propositions are also examined within argument 
structures. 

Next, Chilton examines a transcript from the 1997 inquiry into the Stephen 
Lawrence murder which took place in London, on 22 April 1993 
http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/ap10-156.htm
The transcript is based on a conversation among three of the 
murder suspects. He utilizes the methodological grid provided by the 
notions of legitimization, coercion, and representation in order to obtain 
insights into the type of discourse produced by a self-supporting group. 
One of the most significant findings of this analysis is that background 
knowledge of Powell's 1968 speech and his opinions regarding blacks were 
known and referred to by the interactants for purposes of self-
legitimization. Violent image schematas and shared racist ideology emerge 
through the use of question-answer pairs, rhetorical questions, and vulgar 
intensifiers.

Chapters eight, nine, and ten are included in Part III, the global arena. 
Here the author focuses on the conceptualization of geopolitical space. In 
chapter eight, he analyzes Clinton's address to the nation on 24 March 
1999 for the justification of American and NATO involvement in the 
destruction of the FRY. In his analysis, Chilton ably shows how space 
builders and cognitive frames in propositions are used to appeal to the 
hearers' background knowledge of institutions, history, and American 
values: "(a) joined (our armed forces, our NATO allies) -- space builders: 
our, our today, -ed; cognitive frames: America, armed forces, alliances" 
(page 139). Presuppositions, as well as arguments and predicates are 
analyzed and visually represented as deictically specified reality spaces 
that depend on the speaker's deictically specified reality space (Figure 
8.1, page 141). 

The speaker assumes that hearers possess both geographical and political 
knowledge about the events unfolding and that they share with the speaker 
moral categories (e.g., exists brutality in Kosovo). Causation or agency 
is attributed to the Serbian armed forces in Clinton's discourse thus 
justifying air strikes. Events described in Clinton's speech are located 
in a historical time-event narrative (e.g., Kosovo, Central Europe, Cold 
War, First World War (WWI), Second World War (WWII), the Holocaust, etc.) 
and are illustrated on spatial, temporal, and modal axes (Figure 8.2). 
Further analysis of metonymy (Sarajevo for WWI), metaphor (fire and flames 
of ethnic and religious division), and center-periphery schemas compel the 
hearer or receiver of the speech/text to make the necessary inferences 
with respect to the events unfolding such as the possibility that these 
events will escalate beyond Kosovo and affect American interests. 

Chilton also presents visual representations of metaphor supporting 
inferences concerning events from the center (self/we/us/here/now). He 
suggests four tendencies in the manipulation of ontological spaces in 
Clinton's 1999 speech: the mobilization of conceptual schemas; the linking 
of historical episodes to draw conclusions by analogy; the linking of 
temporally remote spaces with the space of the speaker and hearer in the 
here and now; and the triggering of inference chains that inaction causes 
potentially dangerous consequences. Though Chilton's analysis appears to 
capture the essence of Clinton's text/speech, it is important to keep in 
mind that ordinary Americans would not have access to the type of recent 
historical and political background knowledge that would indeed 
delegitimize Clinton's use of air strikes against the FRY (see Michael 
Parenti's (2000) "To Kill a Nation" for a historical perspective on NATO's 
war crimes under American command.)

Chapter nine presents Chilton's analyses of the talk and text that 
followed the events of the September 11, 2001 destruction of the twin 
towers and simultaneous attack on the Pentagon. Images of the World Trade 
Center and the Pentagon, along with historical and social components of 
shared American culture background knowledge are represented in the minds 
of people who heard the speech of President George W. Bush on 7 October 
2001. Likewise, historical information about the fundamentalist Islamic 
revolution in Iran during the Carter era, the plight of the Palestinian 
people, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and America's military intervention 
known as Operation Desert Storm form part of the historical and political 
background knowledge of many Americans, Islamic followers, and residents 
of the Middle East. 

Chilton also examines the cognitive implications of historical and 
metaphorical representations in the text of Osama bin Laden as processed 
by hearers/readers, as well as the spatial, temporal, and modal 
structuring of Bush's speech and bin Laden's text. In Figure 9.1 he plots 
the distance from we (self/speaker, United States, we, Great Britain, 
other close friends, etc.) on the s-axis following the discourse sequence 
in Bush's speech. Spatial representations are also produced for relative 
distances in geopolitical space (we, here, now, true/right (speaker) vs. 
they/Afghanistan) and for distance and deictic polarization (Figures 9.2 
and 9.3). The author points out that some sentences can be processed at 
the spatial level but others only at the propositional-conceptual level. 
An additional spatial representation of polarizations through conditionals 
and metaphor is shown in Figure 9.4. 

The English translation of Osama bin Laden's text broadcast by Jazeera 
television is also analyzed in terms of its interwoven political and 
theological mental representation. Though it is historically accurate to 
state that in American discourse the political has been separated from the 
religious, this appears to be changing with the reelection of George W. 
Bush. Chilton renders representations of God in both Islamic and Judeo-
Christian traditions as conceptualized on spatial axes and scales (Figure 
9.5). He locates God at the extreme end of s (where s represents the three 
physical spatial dimensions) by assuming his conceptualization as remote 
on the vertical dimension so as to explain bin Laden's expressions, "God 
is above us," "has power over us." But he cautions that this would not be 
an accurate conceptualization of God among American Christian 
fundamentalists who often claim that God is on their side. In terms of the 
vertical dimension, it would be at the close end of s. Figures 9.6 and 9.7 
are multidimensional representations of the location of entities in Bush's 
text (we, the United States), and of the moral values vocabulary in the 
translated bin Laden text, respectively. 

Thus Chilton's discourse processor, embedded in Western cultural 
practices, shows how multi-dimensional deictic space is divided into two 
regions that highlight the striking parallel between the Bush and bin 
Laden conceptualizations of geographical, geopolitical, cultural, and 
moral space. 

The role of religion is further explored in chapter ten. Bush's speech of 
14 September 2001 at St. Patrick's cathedral and its presumptions about 
religion are compared with the bin Laden text, its presumptions, 
analogies, and entailments. Both texts invoke historical and theological 
background knowledge shared by two different audiences, a westernized 
American public and Muslim and Middle Eastern receivers, who mentally 
process different representations of the world. Cognitive frames and 
metaphors are analyzed in both texts which reveal that whereas in the bin 
Laden text there is no separation between the religious and the secular, 
and sacred space seems to extend over an entire region, the Bush text 
shows that God is partly hidden and oriented with his face toward the 
speaker's own face, in a more intimate local space. Chilton speculates 
about the nature of religious belief and prayer in public discourse in the 
American text in light of the currently contested secular/religious 
separation in American society (see also Lakoff, 2004). 

The chapter concludes with a speculation about the possible linkage 
between historical intimations and religious presumptions present in 
Bush's presidential discourse during a crisis situation. There is a 
possible implication in this speech that by attacking America, bin Laden 
is inhibiting the spread of freedom, which represents interference with 
the possibility of choosing moral ends (the Kantian metaphor). 'Moral 
ends' in this sense implies American cultural and economic values. Chilton 
concludes by stating that this mode of argumentation rests on the spatial 
model he has developed and explored in chapters eight through ten.

Chapter 11, Part IV of the book, presents Chilton's concluding thoughts 
concerning a theory of language and politics. He explores the question of 
what it means to communicate in the 21st century across societies, 
culture, and languages but remains primarily focused on F2F interaction. 
He thus leaves out a very important realm in which millions of humans 
communicate on a daily basis: virtual space or the Internet. 

Chilton goes on to speculate about the relationship between language 
ability and political ability, which hints at a possible evolutionary 
explanation for political ability, and urges the reader to move beyond the 
limited views of political discourse in current CDA research by taking 
into account recent findings from cognitive science that show how 
conceptual metaphors, reason, and human actions are shaped by our bodies, 
brains, and modes of functioning in the world. Thus he adopts a broad 
cognitivist perspective in his book which is consistent with the claims of 
Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and recent findings of second-generation 
cognitive science; namely, "that our unconscious conceptual systems make 
use of multiple metaphors and prototypes, especially in the area of 
metaphors for what is right and what is good and ought to be 
pursued."(1999:559). 

In proposing a new theoretical framework, Chilton borrows ideas from 
Aristotle, Chomsky, evolutionary theorists, and cognitive scientists, and 
posits hypotheses based on descriptive and explanatory analyses of 
political texts. Twelve propositions are advanced concerning political 
discourse, of which two constitute major claims: that political discourse 
has specific connections to the emotional centers of the brain, and that 
it is anchored in multi-dimensional deixis. He concludes his ambitious 
task by urging researchers to focus on the processes of the mind in order 
to enhance our understanding of our political human nature, and move away 
from purely critical approaches to the analysis of political discourse.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

This text is not for those without basic background knowledge in areas 
such as rhetoric, generative linguistics, social theory, speech act 
theory, and cognitive science. I would recommend it for graduate students 
seriously interested in theoretical approaches to the study of language 
and politics. Those investigating linguistic strategies and propositional 
structures in political discourse should refer to the author's detailed 
micro-analyses of language samples of political interviews (chapter 5), 
parliamentary debates (chapter 6), and xenophobic speeches and talk 
(chapter 7).

Though the author presents a novel theoretical framework for the analysis 
of political discourse, I found his use of the multi-dimensional spatial 
model to deictically represent specified reality spaces from linguistic 
analyses of political texts in chapters 8, 9, and 10 sometimes difficult 
to follow. Moreover, one wonders how it would be possible to utilize this 
multi-dimensional model in the analysis of large numbers of political 
texts or on different types of political discourse data since the author 
never explains his methodology for compiling a corpus of political texts. 

It is not clear how these political texts were collected and whether or 
not they are principled and representative of various genres of political 
discourse. Surely a combination of methodologies could be used to analyze 
political discourse that would allow researchers to generalize beyond a 
particular sample of political text or discourse genre. For example, in a 
discussion of the discourse-pragmatic functions of remember, Tao (2001) 
successfully shows that corpus linguistic tools and sociocultural 
linguistic analyses can be treated as complementary methodologies. 

Despite some methodological shortcomings and problematic speculations 
about the possible connection between innate political tendencies of 
humans and their innate linguistic abilities, "Analysing Political 
Discourse" is provocative and offers readers a unique international 
perspective. The author's in-depth linguistic analyses of various 
contemporary samples of political discourse bring to light different 
mental representations of political thought and behavior. Given its broad 
scope, "Analysing Political Discourse" would be a valuable resource for 
researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, English, linguistics, 
sociolinguistics, and communication studies.

TYPOS
p. 26 ('is' missing after 'recursivity')
p. 48 ('of' missing)

REFERENCES

Foster, C., ed. (1980). Nations without a State. New York, NJ: Praeger 
Publishers.

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don't think of an elephant. White River Junction, VT: 
Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. New York, NY: 
Basic Books.

Myerson, G. (1994). Rhetoric, Reason and Society. London: Sage 
Publications.

Parenti, M. 2000. To Kill a Nation (The Attack of Yugoslavia). London: 
Verso.

Tao, H. (2001). Discovering the Usual with Corpora: The Case of Remember. 
In Corpus Linguistics in North America, ed. R. C. Simpson and J. M. 
Swales, 16-144. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susana M. Sotillo is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Montclair State 
University in New Jersey and teaches Theories of Second Language 
Acquisition (SLA), the Structure of American English, the Language of 
Propaganda, and Language and Culture. Her current research interests 
include Computer-Mediated Communication and SLA, Corpus Linguistics, and 
Critical Discourse Analysis.





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