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René Dirven/Roslyn Frank/Cornelia Ilie, edd. 2001. Language and ideology. Volume 2: Descriptive cognitive approaches, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 267p.

Chaoqun Xie, Fuzhou (chaoqunxie@yahoo.com.cn)

In recent years, ideology has found its way in much language research. This volume, together with its sister volume (see Dirven et al. 2001), which is devoted to theoretical issues in language and ideology studies, results from a theme session on language and ideology at the 6^th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Stockholm in 1999. In the introduction, the three editors present a very detailed description of the various chapters grouped in three parts, each with a different thematic focus. Part A deals with political ideologies. Bruce Hawkins’ “Ideology, metaphor and iconographic reference” (27-50), is very revealing because it compellingly shows the importance of iconographic reference in accounting for ideology in language. For Hawkins, the social and cognitive codification of ideological systems should take account of iconographic references (p. 30). The deictic foundation of ideology is the focus of Willem J. Botha’s chapter “The deictic foundation of ideology, with reference to African Renaissance” (51-76), which reveals how iconographic references find their way into present-day South African politics. The next chapter, “The semantics of impeachment: Meaning and models in a political conflict” (77-105), contributed by Pamela S. Morgan, uses the House impeachment and Senate Trial of former U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1998-99 to demonstrate that cultural cognitive models do have a crucial role to play in the analysis of political conflicts.

The four chapters of Part B focus on the relationship of ideology and cross-cultural otherness. Lewis P. Sego’s “Philistines, barbarians, aliens, et alii: Cognitive semantics in political ‘otherness’” (107-116) talks about cognitive semantics in political ‘otherness’, while Peter Grundy and Yan Jiang, in their co-authored paper “The bare past as an ideological construction in Hong Kong discourse” (117-134), also draws on cognitive semantics and mental space theory in particular to account for the no-blame-attaches-to-me ideology as shown by the preference for an anomalous use of bare past tense forms in Hong Kong discourse. In the next chapter, which is entitled “Conflicting identities: A comparative study of non-commensurate root metaphors in Basque and European image schemata” (135-160), Roslyn M. Frank and Mikel Susperregi make use of the notions of image schemata and root metaphors to analyze a number of contemporary folk performances, showing that the traditional Basque image schemata “found in Euskera should not be understood as an isolated survival, but rather as perhaps the best preserved exemplar of the metaphiysical foundations and root metaphors embedded in this earlier, yet still recoverable, European cosmovision” (p. 155). The last chapter of Part B, “The Otherness of the Orient: Political-cultural implications of ideological categorisations” (161-188), is contributed by Esra Sandikcioglu, who elaborates on the West’s neo-colonial approach to the Gulf crisis as evidenced in the West’s ideological categorizations. This paper reiterates the cultural embeddedness both language and ideology.

Part C deals with the relationship between cognitive linguistics and institutional ideologies. In “Even the interface is for sale: Metaphors, visual blends and the hidden ideology of the internet” (189-214), Tim Rohrer accounts for the hidden ideology of the internet within the framework of conceptual blending theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner , showing among other things that the cybermarketplace blend is exerting much influence on how we perceive and shape the real world. In “Globalisation for beginners in Argentina: A cognitive approach” (215-234), Liliana Cubo de Severino, Daniel Adrián Israel and Víctor Gustavo Zonana select a random corpus of metaphors from two Buenos Aires newspapers to examine how journalistic discourse reconstructs the idealized cognitive models of globalisation in a positive light for ordinary people. The last article is entitle “Unparliamentary language: Insults as cognitive forms of ideological confrontation” (235-263), where Cornelia Ilie draws our attention to insulting words in the British Houses of Parliament. The author uses insights from institutional discourse analysis, politeness theory and largely Lakoff and Johnson’s experientialist philosophy to investigate the cognitive processes involved in parliamentary debates which are commonly perceived to be full of adversaries and confrontations. Four major properties of unparliamentary language are discussed in terms of the target, the focus, the end-goals and the counter-insults. This chapter demonstrates once again that Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, which by the way, came out in book form in 1987 rather than 1990 as stated by the author, is problematic for the analysis of institutional interaction.

To conclude, this volume brings together ten stimulating descriptive essays to highlight the important position of ideology in the study of language from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. One of the major and indeed remarkable contributions made by this collection of articles is that it shows that the notion of ideology cannot be neglected simply because it seems to prevail in language and in the way we perceive things, the way we utter words and the way we do things. In other words, ideology is not so abstract as usually believed: ideology is so near to us, or rather, it is within us and is part of us.

Reference

Dirven, René/Hawkins, Bruce/Sandikcioglu, Esra (edd.): (2001): Language and Ideology. Volume 1: Cognitive Theoretical Approaches, Amsterdam.

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ISSN 1618-2006