Cross Cultural Discourse-Space Analysis

May 25, 2017 | Autor: Bertie Kaal | Categoria: Discourse Analysis, Social Cognition, Language and Politics
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Cross-cultural Discourse-Space Analysis1 Bertie Kaal VU University Amsterdam, Communication and Information Studies Abstract: Discourse analysis is developing new avenues to investigate the presumptive nature of common ground. The communicative function of a discourse requires common cognitive grounding in a common spatial and temporal coordinate system to establish shared worldviews from which collective intentions for action can emerge. However, the notion of ‘community’ is not a stable factor in a globalising world. In social practice, the generic primacy of spatial cognition (Levinson 2003) is a stable factor that facilitates constructions of common ground and their (re)presentation in culture-specific discourses. In that sense discourse analysis for temporal and spatial frames of reference can provide evidence of cultural and ideological variation. A discourse-space model is proposed for the analysis of coordinate systems of space, time and attitude (STA) in political discourse. It focuses on spatial-coherence schemas that direct the intentional affordances of a text. The approach complements linguistic and content text analysis by adding a cultural-cognitive aspect to political text analysis for party positioning by seeking variation in the coordinate systems by which words and concepts shape parties’ worldviews from which future projections and goals emerge (Van Elfrinkhof et al. 2014). The generic cognitive principle of the method is adaptable to other discourse domains in order to find evidence of unity and diversity in the discursive construction of intentions for collective action. Keywords: Discourse analysis; frames of reference; spatial cognition; worldview; political discourse; election manifestos

Introduction In modern democracies, political communication at election time tends to target the individual and thereby to circumvent the problem of individualisation and increasing cultural diversity. Rather than designing communication to appeal to familiar cultural values, public attention is                                                                                                                

1  This  paper  results  from  a  presentation  given  at  MSLU  Moscow,  Discourse  conference  in  October  2014.    

©  Bertie  Kaal,  Amsterdam.  Revised  10-­‐01-­‐2017.  

 

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  sought to reach an audience across cultures and this needs different anchors. A text is not a text if it is not coherent and therefore political parties seek to present their programmes as a coherent text or discourse world ontology. To reach a broad audience, the construction of that text world needs to be presented around the generic mental “overall organising principle” (Hörnig et al. 2000) that is governed by the “primacy of spatial cognition” in human thought and language (Levinson 2003). The assumption is that spatial orientation and relativisation constitutes the basic rationale of a text for people to make sense of the presumptive nature of its internal worldview. The structure of human thought is cognitively grounded in a coordinate system by analogy with human perception of natural-world space (cf. Barsalou 2008). Spatial analogy provides the epistemic ground for abstract social-worldview constructions that extends to priming intentions for action and the acceptance of social facts – for example, the power-status of a president has intentionality in that social consequences are inherent to the function. Levinson distinguishes three basic frames of reference: intrinsic, relative and absolute (Levinson 2003: 35, 55). Their usage is culturally determined in orientation free or orientation bound egocentric and allocentric directions. Pragmatically, these directions provide a presumptive, rhetorical logic that directs making sense of a course of events in a choice of directions-of-fit: to or from a particular point of view (Searle 2010). To address the presumptive nature of language use in relation to its social function and affordances in a communicative context, discourse analysis needs to include coordinate systems that direct making sense. Methods that go beyond linguistic discourse analysis are required to address extra-linguistic structural influences on the possibilities and constraints on how to make sense of a communicative event. Experimental and empirical cognitive evidence shows that spatial cognition affords organising human perception and making sense of it through culturally engrained evaluative coordinate systems, towards building collective intentions for action (e.g. Duranti 2015). The human cognitive ability to process information by applying cultural coordinate systems forms the basis for effective modes of communication, including language use, to make sense of the world collectively and to create intentional states for cooperation, prior to taking action (Searle 2010; Tomasello 2009). In order to discover variation in political text coherence, text analysis for coordinate systems contributes a party-specific cognitive aspect of the rationale that underlies party positions. This may serve as evidence to explain how, for example, twenty-two Dutch political parties can have such very different views on a small country in Western Europe.

 

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  Spatial dimensions of text and discourse worlds Political discourse is a particularly spatial domain because it is inherently geopolitical as well as temporal in that a government has a fixed term and will try to implement its plans in that period of time. From an argumentation point of view, parties need to present a worldview to support their future projections, goals and proposed policies. The spatial dimensions of textand discourse worlds concern the scope of attention presented (Werth 1999) and the scope of the specific discourse world in which it functions (Chilton 2004), as in the Dutch political discourse at election time. The political space is situated in a macro-world of natural facts that may be presumed or selectively drawn to attention. Attention frames are deictically layered sets of attention spaces. In a predominantly egocentric culture (such as the Dutch culture) the layers of attention move predominantly from the known here-and-now (the deictic ‘Index Field’, Bühler 1990 [1934]) to less familiar there-and-then timespaces that interact and evolve continuously in an evaluative process towards taking position. On the other hand, discrete, stative timespaces are a compressed version of a social period. They function as an ontological conceptual framework of definable space and duration (May and Thrift 2001) – for example, the Second World War. The internal coordinate system of an attention space hosts a vantage point – e.g. the speaker – and affords relativisation and prioritisation. The experience of an event is expressed in force directions-of-fit (Croft and Cruse 2004; Searle 2010: 27-28) between the deictic centre and layered peripheral attention spaces. Each layer presumes a different episteme, deonticity and commitment and relies on the extent of knowledge, the force of beliefs, desires/intentions, the sense of certainty about social facts and the non-negotiable certainty of natural facts. For example, the cardinal directions North-EastSouth-West have zero direction-of-fit, whereas knowledge is considered true if analogies can be detected with the natural world in the world-to-word (anchored in natural facts) or world to word (anchored in beliefs and desires) direction-of-fit (Searle 2010). The second direction of fit concerns subjective desires and intentions that require managing the world to satisfy them. The ideal situation may be double direction-of-fit, when the certainty of natural facts aligns with the certainty of social facts and the force of desires and intentions. The cognitive principle of experiencing and relativising an event is expressed in layered attention spaces and their distance or proximity to a deictic centre.

 

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  From making sense to taking action Communication is the essential connection between what perception, knowledge, beliefs, experience and cooperation. The human brain is not equipped to include the entire world ontology in every communicative event, so communication has to compress complexity and rely on common ground and presumption to be effective. Lyotard (1984[1979]) called this kind of implicit meta-narrative background rationale the “narrative myth”, holding that narrative structure dominates meaning construction in the background. Narrative structure is a deep, non-verbal, layer of meaning-making that is culturally conventionalized in a way that forms the ground for the trajectory from perception, attention and memory to information processing (cognition). Language and other means of communication are the vehicles to establish collective commitment, imagine future projections and share intentions for action. Figure 1 is a very simplified visualisation of this process to illustrate its re-producibility. Circularity is not the only way to visualise the process, which may be linear, spiral, or irregularly jumping backward and forward while interacting with external patterns.

Figure 1. Human information processing from perception to action.

Perception: Non-conscious, raw sensory-motor perception of objects in the here and now of the conceiver. Cognition: mental organisation of perception, relative to a deictic centre for the observed to make sense to the perceiver (i.e. to be conceived by someone). Awareness and memory: conscious perception that can be stored in memory

 

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  Communication: the perceiver presents the perceived with an intention to inform others, to share or to co-construct ‘fit’ in a particular social reality. Intentions for action: ‘Fit’ provides in an internal epistemic certainty (coherence) that can trigger attitude and collective intentions for action. Evaluation leads to making perceptions fit and to commitment, e.g. by changing the conceptualisation to fit the context ‘better’, or by changing the context so that the conceptualisation fits better, or by not changing anything when a perception fits the broader worldview. Collective action is optional, depending on the level of satisfaction with the state of affairs, ability to satisfy intentions and the force of desire for change (commitment). This cycle can be repeated and adapted on the basis of new perceptions in a different setting. It appears that there must be an analogical systematicity between all levels of human understanding that is afforded by spatial cognition. Logically, there must be a single simple principle that links them up so that we can understand abstract, experienced and imagined, worlds in terms of real world facts (Searle  2010:  7)  so  as  to  confirm  the  reality  factor  of   collective  experience.  Over the past decades, developments in neuro-cognitive science have provided evidence of interactive mental networks between parts of the brain that deal with spatial perception and the visualisation of deictic relations between ‘objects’ and points of view (Li and Gleitman 2002). Cognitive Linguistic studies show analogical spatial patterns in language use, for example Fauconnier’s mental spaces (1994), that are communicated in a variety of culturally coordinate systems (e.g. Levinson and Wilkins 2006 on cultural variations in grammars of space). Moreover, by creating social worlds on the same principle by which the real world is perceived, people can commit to social facts and collective worldviews because they are fundamentally constructed in a similar coordinate system. The abstract world has an analogical construction to the natural world so that a reality check against the natural world can give a sense of factuality to social phenomena, such as the natural connotation of money, in the TIME IS MONEY metaphor.

Worldviews Worldview is an individual’s or a group of people’s ontological understanding of the world. Worldview of the social world is directed by the nature of a cultural coordinate system that is fostered by traditions and social institutions such as the education system, law, the constitution and democracy. The coordinate system of worldview consists of levels of space  

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  and time frames of reference, relative to a deictic centre that together afford evaluation and positioning. The analogy between natural and social world perception and its communicative presentation gives the social world a sense of factuality and commitment. However, unlike the real world, abstract reality is in principle an open and liquid system that transforms in interaction with other social realities. Public institutions can merely restrain change as long as they have public support and the public has power. However, states of affairs change as does the perception and attitude to attitude to perceived states of affairs. The question is then whether people adapt to the system or whether people require the system to adapt. In both scenarios, the principle of coordinate systems allows unlimited variation in deliberating and negotiating attitudes and intentions for action. This fluidity of human cognition equips people to deal with diversity and wanted or unwanted, expected or unexpected change. It affords adaptability. People have agency – and power – because we can imagine abstract worlds that can be manipulated and changed at will, unlike the natural world. However, the human mind is not equipped for a full-blown ontological understanding and awareness of the entire world. To understand the world and to have a sense of agency, we need to be able to cut it up into smaller or compressed ‘worlds’, which explains how people and political parties can have such very different worldviews about the same timespace.

Intention for action in mind and language Evolutionarily it is obvious that cooperation gets more things done (Tomasello 2009) but joint action relies on the ability to establish common ground for collective intentionality. The spatial nature of human cognition equips people for interaction and action itself and to establish common ground for collective intentions for action through evaluative processing and negotiation, facilitated by: a. An overall organizing principle (Hornig et al. 2000): The primacy of spatial cognition (Levinson 2003) b. Coordinate systems of time and space relations relative to a deictic centre (Levinson 2003); c. Common knowledge and a sense of time and space d. Geometrical relations and force directions to/from a deictic centre (Chilton 2013) expressing force of attitude, desires and intentions for action. Communicatively, a discursive worldview frame is based in a schematic cognitive coordinate system, organised on three principles of human reasoning:  

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  -- Scope of attention set in a time and space frame-of-reference (t- and s-FoR) -- Perspective: point of view (Origo or relatum, usually the here and now of the speaker in egocentric cultures) -- Relations between time and space anchors, timespaces and force and directions-of-fit. By way of the spatial principle people can build, have and rebuild sets of common norms and values that constitute a community and its cooperative will. There is then a common ground for volition to cooperate (Tomasello 2009). The key to joint action is in deliberation and negotiation via communication. In that sense, language use is a form of social behaviour that facilitates cooperation. However, a community is in principle unstable as it continuously interacts with external factors, such as other communities, technology and shifting power relations. For example, the globalisation of internet access has contributed to destabilising communities by challenging their traditions which has an effect on democracy that can no longer sustain reasonably stable ideologies when public information is on the loose reaching far beyond national borders at the touch of a button. It is today more attractive to target audiences at the very basic pragmatic and experiential cognitive level rather than to continue to appeal to increasingly unstable couleurs locals. The challenge of social globalisation is to maintain stability in the face of an information overload as well as the demise of the geospatial episteme and culturally familiar mainstays. If culture loses its natural episteme of geospatial grounding, consequently new epistemic anchors will be sought to maintain a sense of the epistemic grounding of certainty and identity. The question is whether this epistemic shift (Foucault 1972) maintains its anchoring in external space and time or whether it shifts towards internal anchors. It then becomes essential to keep track of who owns the anchors and to whose benefit, i.e. who has the power? Traditionally, various strategies have been employed to gain and stabilize power: a. By force: declarations and threats (Royalty, dictatorship; neoliberal management principles; coups d’états) b. By preferential strategies, as noted by Machiavelly and Gramsci, to please the elite and to uphold a hegemonic discourse of existing power c. Ideological and religious strategies: target followers and foster commitment (often by excluding opponents/non-believers) d. Democratically: rhetorical devices of targeting the electorate with salient, every-day issues and masking controversial, unpopular issues; by juxtaposition; or appeals to public sentiment.

 

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  These strategies have different directions of fit: from a power position to enforcing power (suppressive force and hegemony) to bringing ideology to the public in an attractive way (persuasive ideological or religious beliefs), or fostering a dialectical relationship between power, the public and consent on broad issues (persuasive and dialectical democracy). These strategies are effective only as long as we have geographically local governments and institutions, but globalisation and technological innovations present fundamentally different forms of communication that call for new strategies in the face of rapid change. For example, the US president’s use of Twitter to convey his proposed policies in less than 40 characters is proving to be a successful method to disseminate his decisions as it is picked up by the established media as well as social networks. It literally goes viral, perhaps because of its unheard of novelty (or audacity). Traditional differences in and between communities -- such as nationality, age groups, class, gender, religion, ethnic background, geographic location, physical ability -- that were once the targets of political communication can be bypassed at the abstract level of the spatial organising principle without the analogy with geospace. In fact, it makes communication less transparent, relying more on presumptions emerging from a virtual ‘common ground’ that has no epistemic base. Because it has become less clear how arguments and intentions for action are grounded discourse-space analysis can serve to clarify what type of grounding is used. I will briefly illustrate how discourse-space analysis can be applied for this purpose with a case study on a corpus of Dutch election manifestos (Kaal 2013).

A discourse-space model for party positioning Dutch election manifestos are a particularly stable text genre that has been and is produced consistently around elections for many decades. The hypothesis is that time and space frames of reference can reveal diversity in parties’ ideologically motivated intentions for action by seeking their grounding. I assume we need some definition of ‘ideology’ to explain variation in political worldviews so as to be able to map parties on relevant dimensions in a comparative way. In principle, deictic-space analysis was developed on the basis of linguistic theories and methods (Chilton 2004; Levinson 2003) to find variation in coordinate systems of time, space and modality. However, I propose a model to extract discursive construction aspects of the schematic temporal and spatial grounding of politically motivated action. Such worldview construction operates in the background of verbal spatial constructions. The  

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  question does not aim to be descriptive but rather it isprocess oriented. As Searle (2010: 3) points out, the question is not ‘what’ people want or do, but ‘how’ people are motivated to want and do things: “How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents” when people have such very different worldviews and such very different conceptions of how the world ticks? The key is in the analogy between the way we understand social facts and the way we perceive natural facts, as well as the way we conceptualise, nominalise and communicate social phenomena as if they were objects instead of processes. The assumption is that a strong connection between natural facts and social facts gives social facts their epistemic quality of certainty and stability. The development of a discourse-space model for Space, Time and Attitude analysis intends to reveal variation in the scope of a party’s primary temporal and spatial worldview and peripheral layers of attention (Figure 2). The time dimension stretches from past, present to future; the space dimension reaches from Here to the spatial limits of our imagination, while the Attitude dimension catches the modality of attitude toward time and space nodes. The grey field is the primary attention field: the party’s concept of here and now (Kaal 2013).

  Figure  2.  Discourse  spaces  in  Dutch  election  manifestos.

  Data consisted of the introductory paragraphs of election manifestos for the Dutch national election of 2010. Figures 3-5 show STA results for three ideologically very different parties: the Christian Democrats (CDA), the GreenLeft (GL) and the Party for Freedom (PVV).

 

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  Figure 3. CDA scope of attention EM Intro 2010. (1) “Globalization is putting our economic position under pressure. To prevent decline we will continue to invest in the infrastructure.”

Figure 4. GL scope of attention EM Intro 2010. (2) “We are a world country. Our economy runs on energy from abroad. … Our future depends on good neighbours and far friends.”

Figure 5. PVV scope of attention EM Intro 2010. (3) “Our streets are being terrorised by hooligans. Many regions of NL are unsafe. Where crime used to be incidental, we now witness whole burroughs highjacked. The street terrorists have taken over.”

 

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  Some example sentences are given to illustrate the text-world frames, but the actual scope emerges from the introductory paragraphs of each manifesto in which the ‘scene is set’ to frame intentions for action. The attitude dimension was valued on a 5-point scale and was used to calibrate the time and space nodes deictically as a sliding factor (f) that has been integrated in the figures (neutral f 1; positive f 1; very positive f 2; negative f -1 and very negative f -2). This 2-D discourse space analysis shows variations in the schematic frames of reference of political reasoning between three parties that connect with their ideological motivation and strategies to gain public support. The contribution of this method is that even if parties focus on issues that will draw public attention at election time, their deeper ideological differences are grounded in the coordinate system of time and space frames of reference and point of view. Variation in the scope of parties’ attention frames adds a new dimension to party positioning that underlies political dimensions based on content analysis.

Discussion Political discourse is specifically an intentional discourse-for-action that concerns geographic space (the nation) and time (government periods, historical knowledge) and essential social issues, such as health care, education, aging and security. I propose that STA analysis of worldview frames can be applied to other discourse domains that construct worldviews to foster intentions for action as well, such as in doctor-patient interaction; management-staff interaction and social settings such as group sports, or deciding to go to a movie with a group of friends. In each situation deliberation and commitment rely on the spatial and temporal frame of the imagined event, and the coordinate system’s directions of fit. Commitment requires more than common knowledge. It also requires emotional alignment, which can be established by finding common ground in spatial and temporal proximisation and distancing. Modern communication channels require novel methods for text and discourse analysis to provide evidence for interpretations of possible the social consequences of today’s modes of communication that afford global communication at the touch of a button and triggers the human senses at deeper levels of (un-) awareness that have had no time to evolve. Effective global communication needs to target audiences across cultures and this can be achieved by convincingly creating a ground-floor sense of reality (coordinate system) that is based in spatial cognitive processes but lacks the epistemic grounding in external space and  

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  time. A cognitive approach to discourse studies connects with all modes of communication and socialization in an approach to seeking out how we create social worlds and live by them. Acknowledgement I would like to thank the Moscow State University Moscow and Prof. Olga Iriskhanova and Prof. Alan Cienki for welcoming me at the Discourse as Practice conference (MSLU, October 2014) and for letting me present this work in progress. The presentation was awarded the ‘best presentation’ certificate for early career scholars.

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