Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse

Abstract

This article aims at reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. By contrast, cognitive metaphor research has recently developed to emphasize the embodied, i.e. neural, origins of metaphor at the expense of its sociodiscursive impact. This article takes up the concept of social cognition, arguing that it organizes the modification of, and access to, cognitive resources, with metaphoric models playing a particularly salient role in the constitution of ideology. In a cyclical process, ideology will help particular models gain prominence in discourse, which will, in turn, impact on cognition. To illustrate the point, the article draws on an extensive corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions, showing how that particular discourse centres on an ideologically vested metaphoric model of evolutionary struggle.