Language, space and politics

This chapter provides a theoretical and practical basis for a cognitive-linguistic contribution to Political Discourse Analysis. Relying on cognitive experimental and comparative research in patterns of thought, language and conceptualisation, cognitive linguistic analysis provides information for interpretations of linguistic constructions. Over the past decades, cognitive science has been providing evidence of the fundamentally spatial nature of human cognition. Cognitive- and anthropological linguistic research confirms the generic analogical relationship between spatial cognition and the spatial nature of linguistic constructions of meaning. This analogy has evolved into a successful means to establish common ground for social interaction. Although cognitive linguistics is an essentially descriptive approach to identifying linguistic patterns, it provides a reliable source to investigate the spatial nature of discourses to estimate possible political consequences. As argued in the chapter, among several cognitive linguistic models it is Chilton’s Discourse Space Theory that has come to be regarded as fundamental to political discourse analysis, because language and politics are both anchored in space as well as time.