Epistemic stancetaking and speaker objectification in a spatio-cognitive discourse world
A critical contrastive analysis of political discourse
This paper seeks to apply a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies in an investigation of epistemic stancetaking and types of inter/subjectivity of the speaker in political discourse. More specifically, the paper presents an analysis of responses by three different politicians, i.e. John Kerry, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin, to the chemical weapons attack in Syria in August 2013. By incorporating cognitive-linguistic theories in a critical investigation of language, I address diverging representations of the same event and their discursive functions in representing underlying ideologies and motifs of the respective politicians. Specifically, I propose a more nuanced incorporation of epistemic stance in a spatio-cognitive representation of discourse. My analysis shows that type of inter/subjectivity has bearing on the epistemic quality of a proposition. The more prominently a speaker construes him-/herself as evaluator of an event, the stronger his/her assertions become, which is equally visible in a discourse space model.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical and methodological framework: Epistemic stancetaking and speaker objectification in a discourse space model
- 2.1Epistemic stancetaking and types of speaker objectification
- 2.2Spatio-cognitive discourse worlds or discourse space theory
- 3.Data: The 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria
- 4.Construing the chemical attack in Syria: A critical contrastive analysis
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
Haselow, Alexander
2020.
Expressing stance in spoken political discourse—The function of parenthetical inserts.
Language Sciences 82
► pp. 101334 ff.
Ma, Qian & Qiufang Wen
2023.
Can space be conceptualized in a different way in political discourse? An extended application of Discourse Space Theory.
Discourse & Society 34:6
► pp. 712 ff.
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