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BIO
Christopher Hart is Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. His work draws on insights and methods from cognitive science and critical discourse analysis to investigate the links between language, cognition and social/political action. Specifically, he uses models developed in Cognitive Linguistics, including cognitive grammar, conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual semantics, to analyse the ideological and de/legitimating potential of conceptualisations evoked by linguistic (and other semiotic) forms found in political and media discourses. He is also interested in multimodality including, specifically, the relationship between language and image in multimodal texts as well as the role of gesture in situated political communication. He often uses experimental methods to investigate empirically the effects of textual features on audience attitudes and responses to social/political issues. Much of his work is focussed on anti-immigration discourses and discourses of civil disorder in the form of riots, strikes and protests.
Further information at:
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/christopherhart/
Testing for textual effects in Critical Discourse Analysis
Testing for textual effects in Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been accused of over-interpreting the effects of textual choices on readers’ attitudes and opinions and of offering instead overly-subjective analyses of texts. To counter these arguments, various ways of triangulating analyses have been developed, including the use of corpus linguistic and experimental methods. In this talk, I introduce recent experimental work which has been carried out primarily within cognitive linguistic approaches to CDA. I will present three experimental projects: (i) event-structure in discourses of civil disorder; (ii) metaphor in discourses of immigration; and (iii) evidentially in discourses of military intervention. Across the three case studies, I will cover issues of experimental design, methods and analysis. Results from the three case studies show that textual choices like transitivity and metaphor do matter but that reader-responses are more nuanced than is sometimes assumed.
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