The Comparison of Theoretical Basis between CDA and Cognitive Linguistics

【摘要】 批判性话语分析和认知语言学是当代两个快速发展的语言学流派。两者均形成与20世纪70年代，并逐步成为当今具有一定影响力的语言学研究模式，但它们在研究方法和内容方面的侧重有所不同。本文主要对比分析两者的哲学其语言学基础。

【关键词】 批判性话语分析 认知语言学 哲学基础 语言学基础

Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics are the two rapidly developing schools in contemporary linguistic schools, and both of them came into being in 1970s and gradually developed into today's influential paradigm of linguistic research. In this paper, their philosophical basis, linguistic basis, will be mainly expounded and compared.

1. philosophical basis

The philosophical foundation of CDA is Western Marxism of Frankfurt School, which utilizes basic Marxist alienation theory and Hegelian dialectic method to establish the critical theory of society. One of the school's purposes is to study and explain the dynamics of social change, which is also the concern of CDA. They believe that ideology serves to control human mind and to prevent people from self-liberation; Therefore ,the primary task for them to do is ideology critique, aiming to reveal what ideology obscures. They focus on the commercial media, arguing that the media in capitalistic society are manipulated by hegemony of nation to realize the domination of people. The language of these media is just for the spreading of capitalistic ideology. So it should be strongly criticized. Later, CDA thinks mass media as tools to serve for ideology could also be criticized from linguistic perspective. In contrast to radicalism ideological criticism, the ideological notions of CDA is comparatively mild and moderate.

Cognitive Linguistics is rooted in the philosophical theory of experiential realism epistemology, which is a subjective and objective combination. It is accompanied by the development of a new generation of cognitive science, unlike the old empiricism. Empiricism views that there just exist cognitions and experiences relative to certain natural and socio-cultural environment and emphasizes the importance of experience in human cognition and language. The experiences of human being come from the interactions between man and nature, between man and society, from their sensory and intellectual communications with nature as well as other people. So each kind of experience must comply with certain laws and possess a certain structure.

From comparison above, we can find there are more similarities and minor differences in the philosophical foundation between CDA and cognitive linguistics. In general, they are both based on Western Marxism, and both emphasize the meanings of language is based on the experiences of human. but the former stresses the relations between language and society and its understanding of experiences more highlight its dynamic sociality.

2. Linguistic foundation

CDA mainly adopts the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and SFG as its linguistic foundation. Sapir and Whorf propose that people perceive the world through language, but language is not a transparent medium and it may distort the reality to influence and even determine people's thinking patterns. People may choose from the sub-systems in line with the social function they want to achieve. CDA holds the same view that language should serve to attain certain social functions.

Cognitive linguistics places the language use on the basis of human experience and attempt to solve the problem about how humans to understand their own world, the key is the relationship between language and mind (Pinker, 1994),and meaning is an important part of their research. on one hand, cognitive linguistics respects researches on brain and thinking in other fields of cognitive sciences such as the cognitive and developmental psychology, cognitive anthropology, neurobiology, etc. and efforts to make its interpretations of language be consistent with the known mind awareness. On the other hand, cognitive linguistics holds that people in all aspects of cognitive competence, semantic factors and communicative function will have impact on the syntactic rules,.

3. Conclusion

From the discussed above, we can find that cognitive linguistics and CDA are interested in backstage cognition revealed by linguistic forms，which is one critical factor in deciding discourse meaning. The core of the comparison between CDA and cognitive linguistics is that we are conscious of the roles of ideology and critical discourse analysis as a scientific method. The major difference of Cognitive linguistics and CDA lies in the following: the former primarily focused on analyzing the each independent sentence under the framework of conceptual metaphors, obviously tending to establish general principles and seek for universality of cognitive and the repeated together with their scientifically repeated interpretations.

Cognitive linguistics itself is a framework of linguistic analysis. Specifically speaking, cognitive linguistics can provide a new framework for political discourses. The concepts of cognitive linguistics also provide a toolbox that is used to identify and analyze linguistic and psychological strategies manipulating political discourses. In a word, cognitive linguistics and CDA have their own theoretical advantages and deficiencies and are high complementary with each other.

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