Hart, Christopher (2015) Viewpoint in linguistic discourse : space and evaluation in news reports of political protests. Critical Discourse Studies, 12 (3). pp. 238-260. ISSN 1740-5904
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Abstract
This paper continues to develop a program of research which has recently emerged investigating the ideological functions of spatial construals in social and political discourse from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective (Cap 2013; Chilton 2004; Dunmire 2011; Filardo Llamas 2013; Hart 2013a/b, 2014a; Kaal 2012). Specifically, inspired by principles in Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2008), the paper attempts to formulate a grammar of ‘point of view’ and show how this trans-modal cognitive system is manifested in the meanings of individual grammatical constructions which, when selected in discourse, yield mental representations whose spatial properties invite ideological evaluations. The link between spatial organisation and ideological evaluation in these mental models, it is argued, is a function of our embodied understanding of language. These theoretical arguments are illustrated with data taken from online news reports of two political protests.