What is it about?
The aim of this chapter is to analyse the conceptualisation of current social and political change in the UK by identifying and specifying selected patterns of language use. Provided that language can be viewed as a collective repository of memory chunks, linked to units of conceptual knowledge such as schemas, categories and conceptual metaphors and metonymies or blends, two selected lexical concepts, that is, ‘the people’ and ‘country’, used in two different speeches will be seen as exponents of discursively constructed ideas and values. This study will highlight how the use of two selected lexical concepts, in the hands of two former top agents of British politics, can be a powerful conceptual and discourse strategy to frame economic, political and social issues and to serve emotional and ideological purposes. Through concomitant linguistic expressions, the strongly mediatised political, economic and ideological debate about sovereignty, identity, immigration or economics becomes effectively persuasive and manipulative. Theoretical assumptions and methodological tools are provided by different fields such as cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics.
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Why is it important?
Beyond the descriptive nature of a linguistic study, the paper provides an analytical toolbox for uncovering hidden meanings in public discourse.
Perspectives
The analysis of public discourse is a vibrant, ever-expanding field that requires a clearly articulated and concise introduction to the field.
Professor Rainer Schulze
Leibniz University of Hanover
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Coloring the Utterance with Some Kind of Perceivable Affect’:, September 2023, JSTOR,
DOI: 10.2307/jj.6445827.9.
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