Critical Discourse Analysis and Language Cognition

An interdisciplinary study of issues of language manipulation, this book explores the interpretation stage of critical discourse analysis (CDA) for students in areas such as English language, media studies and applied linguistics, as well as practitioners in the field. It also offers a new way forward for highlighting manipulative language, accomplishing this through the innovation of a model of reading for gist. The model is an original synthesis of elements from four contemporary cognitive frameworks: connectionism, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistic evidence on inference generation, and relevance theory. Significantly, Kieran O'Halloran also shows how each of these frameworks challenges current notions of cognition in CDA and he carefully works through the implications of this for how CDA highlights manipulative language.