The objective of this article is to describe and understand the language of paramilitary groups in the Northern Irish context, taking statements issued by the Irish Republican Army as an example. In order to do so, we depart from a broad understanding of political discourse. So as to understand how beliefs, actions and the IRA existence are legitimised in those statements, Text-World Theory is combined with critical discourse analysis approaches. Chilton's notion of ‘discourse worlds’ is considered the main legitimising strategy, (...) and these – understood as mental representations – are identified by relying on a micro-analysis of linguistic choices. Thirty-nine IRA statements delivered after the 1998 Agreement have been analysed in order to understand both synchronic responses to given socio-political events and diachronic changes related to the advances of the Northern Irish Peace process. (shrink)

The paper has two related aims. One is to outline a proposal for a spatially motivated model of discourse, called Discourse Space Theory. The other is to use this framework to explore, in a relatively formalised way, the spatial basis of the conceptual complexities arising in the uses of the English progressive verb form. The theory utilises an abstract space in three dimensions. Verb stems are associated with Aktionsart schemas; aspectual forms like the progressive are viewed as operations on these (...) schemas. The proposal is that geometric concepts, specifically coordinate systems and vectors, can provide a motivated formalism for investigating conceptual structures generated by a human discourse processor. (shrink)

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

The history of ideology and its definition continues to occupy scholars across a range of disciplines. Contrary to the vast volume of earlier work on ideology however, this books provides a challenging new theory of ideology, one that is capable of explaining not only the internal structures of ideologies, but also how ideologies function in society. In formulating theory that is capable of providing the first insights into the internal structures of ideologies while simultaneously explaining how discourse structures may be (...) used in the production and reproduction of ideologies, van Dijk offers a highly important theoretical bridge between the micro and macro structures of society. This book will be essential for all students of discourse studies, communication, social psychology, sociology, and political science. (shrink)