Discourse Semantics and Ideology (original) (raw)
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Ideology and discourse analysis
Contrary to most traditional approaches, ideologies are defined here within a multidisciplinary framework that combines a social, cognitive and discursive component. As 'systems of ideas', ideologies are sociocognitively defined as shared representations of social groups, and more specifically as thè axiomatic ' principies of such representations. As the basis of a social group's selfimage, ideologies organize its identity, actions, aims, norms and values, and resources as well as its relations to other social groups. Ideologies are distinct from the sociocognitive basis of broader cultural communities, within which different ideological groups share fundamental beliefs such as their cultural knowledge. Ideologies are expressed and generally reproduced in the social practices of their members, and more particularly acquired, confirmed, changed and perpetuated through discourse. Although general properties of language and discourse are not, as such, ideologically marked, systematic discourse analysis offers powerful methods to study the structures and functions of underlying' ideologies. The ideological polarization between ingroups and outgroups-a prominent feature of the structure of ideologies-may also be systematically studied at all levels of text and talk, e.g. by analysing how members of ingroups typically emphasize their own good deeds and properties and the bad ones of the outgroup, and mitigate or deny their own bad ones and the good ones of the outgroup.
Critical Discourse Analysis: Scrutinizing Ideologically-Driven Models
Elixir Ling. & Trans, 2014
AB S T RA CT Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse-analytical research that primarily investigates the way ideology, dominance, social power abuse, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk (and, more recently, through visual images, sound and other forms of semiosis in the social and political context. This entails a diversity of approaches to CDA research, drawing on various linguistic analytic techniques and different social theories, although all involve some form of close textual (and/or multimodal) analysis. This paper attempts to provide an overview of CDA, the multiple meanings of CDA, and the most important models of CDA, namely Critical Linguistics and Social Model, Relational-Dialectic Model, Socio-cognitive Model, and Discourse-Historical Model.
This chapter focuses on the manifestation of ideology in social media interaction, both in explicit contestation and in implicit frameworks. Following a discussion of the key concepts of ideology and discourse, three exemplary studies are presented that show how ideology can be investigated in different ways and on different scales, from looking at blogs and forums, where ideologies are the explicit topics of research, to trolling on Twitter, where ideology is enacted in the way users respond to specific users and topics. Finally, we discuss key methodological issues and controversies in the study of ideology in social media.
Ideology and discourse: Convergent and divergent developments
Mapping Ideology in Discourse Studies, 2022
In this introductory chapter, we summarize some of the most prominent theorizations of discourse and/or ideology in critical and functionalist approaches to the socially infused study of language, language use, and discourse. These include broad ontologies and epistemologies, approaches, and strands, as well as individual thinkers and schools of thought that are specific to a country or a university. We conclude the chapter by presenting a summary of the contents of each chapter of this collected volume, along with our final remarks.
2019
This study tests the hypothesis and assumption of much critical scholarship that the discourse of mass media news transmits prejudicial ideologies to news consumers, influencing the way they think about social justice issues and non-dominant groups in American society, including immigrants, women, and African-Americans. Taking off from the motivations and premises of Critical Discourse Analysis concerning language, power, and ideology, this study aims to extend that paradigm in several ways by applying the analytic techniques of cognitive and critical linguistics to uncover implicit representations in biased discourse. This study also goes beyond previous work by examining the reader comments on media texts to understand how the media's discourse was received and interpreted, with a focus on the covert transmission of ideological messages. The results reveal how ideologies of prejudice are communicated implicitly through media discourse and how readers' own ideologies influence that process, as evidenced by their comments. As a study in Critical Discourse Analysis, this study uncovers abuses of power impacting social justice-in this case the power of writing for the mass media to mold American minds, and therefore influence Americans' behavior, including elections. Specific news articles from the American networks CNN and Fox were chosen on each of two topics for their relevance to current sociopolitical issues of prejudice and social justice: the US Supreme Court June 2018 decision to uphold the Trump administration "travel ban" and the January 2019 Gillette advertisement, considered controversial for its seemingly feminist criticism of male behavior.
The notion of ideology is a fairly complex and controversial one. According to Williams (1976: 126), the word 'ideology' 'first appeared in English in 1796, as a direct translation of the new French word idéologie which had been proposed in that year by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy', to denote the 'science of ideas, in order to distinguish it from the ancient metaphysics'. In addition to this scientific sense, there is a more pejorative sense of the word in the philosophical tradition, originating from the 19th century and popularised by the writings of Marx & Engels (1976). For them, the ruling ideas of an epoch were 'nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships', and failure to realise this produced ideology as an upside-down version of reality. This is reflected in the notion of ideology as 'false consciousness'. There is also a more neutral sense of ideology in Marx' writings, ideology as a 'set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests' (Williams, 1976: 129). This sense was elaborated by Lenin for whom ideology is the system of ideas that are appropriate to a social class, usually an economically defined class, identified by a qualifying adjective: proletarian ideology, bourgeois ideology, etc. More recent philosophers have focused on the implicit and unconscious materialisation of ideologies in practice. For example, Gramsci (1971: 328) defined ideology as 'a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in the manifestations of individual and collective life'. Ideologies are, thus, 'tied to action, and [...] judged in terms of their social effects rather than their truth values' (Fairclough, 1995:76). Ideology is also often connected with power and domination, i.e. class power and domination, in the Marxist tradition, or linked to Gramsci's concept of hegemony (cf. Fairclough, 1995: 17).