Chair: Christopher Hart (University of Hertfordshire) and Dominik Lukeš (University of East Anglia)
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) identifies three analytic stages: description, interpretation and explanation. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics has become synonymous with description-stage analysis of representation in text. And at the explanation stage, CDA is associated with Marxism and Critical Theory. Very little work, however, has been carried out at the interpretation stage, which is concerned with discourse processing. Discourse processing, of course, involves meaning construction as understood in cognitive linguistics or cognitive pragmatics. Cognitive linguistics is a broad paradigm subsuming a number of distinct theories and thus offering a range of potential analytical tools to CDA. But whilst CDA has made use of conceptual metaphor theory, it has not recognised cognitive linguistic approaches to discourse and the input they provide at the interpretation-stage. Similarly, cognitive approaches to pragmatics have not been recognised in CDA.
This methodologically-oriented session then, invites papers addressing meaning construction in critical discourse analysis from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and cognitive pragmatics. As such, papers applying conceptual blending theory, construction grammar, discourse space theory, frame negotiation, mental space theory or relevance theory, for example, are particularly welcome.
Please send abstracts of no longer than 400 words to c.j.hart@herts.ac.uk by 10 DECEMBER 2007. Authors should include their name, affiliation and email address. Successful authors will be notified via email by 15 February 2008.
Chair: Jens O. Zinn, j.zinn@kent.ac.uk
In public and academic discourse risk gained ground in the last decades. Many sociologists believe that risk has become the core category to understand social reproduction and change (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). However, there are still major debates about the characteristics of risk as a social semantic and how risk occupies a position as a social "master-discourse".
This session invites papers from linguistics researchers, sociologists and other social scientists who examine the semantic of risk, how risk discourse takes place in different social domains and how it developed historically. Contributions which reflect on the ideological character of risk are particularly welcome.
This session is intended as an interdisciplinary session, which brings together risk researchers and socio-linguists interested in discourse analysis. It is organised by the Social Contexts and Responses to Risk network (SCARR) and the research networks on the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty (SoRU) of the European Sociological Association (ESA, RN22) and the International Sociological Association (ISA, TG04).
Please send abstracts no longer than 400 works by end of November to j.zinn@kent.ac.uk