Cultural Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies

The present volume explores the meeting ground between Critical Discourse Studies and Cultural Linguistics. The contributions investigate culture-specific conceptualisations, ways of framing and conceptual metaphors in political discourse, as well as cultural models, cultural stereotypes and stereotyping. The individual authors use quantitative (e.g. corpus-based approaches) and/or qualitative methods. They address a range of contexts, e.g. Europe, the US, Japan, West Africa, and a variety of topics, e.g. migration, presidential elections, identity, food culture, concepts of health. The papers included in this volume show that ideologies, the key concern of Critical Discourse Studies, cannot be analysed independently of cultural conceptualisations. In a complementary, dialectic fashion, cultural conceptualisation, the central concern of Cultural Linguistics, have ideological implications, sometimes subtle, sometimes very straightforward. The present volume thus illustrates that travelling on this meeting ground is a natural and fruitful endeavour for both approaches.