The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse studies: Integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods

Two important challenges currently facing critical discourse studies (CDS) concern (1) the nature of language processing and (2) the relation between linguistic and multimodal approaches. In this article, I seek to address both issues by advancing an integrated cognitive and multimodal approach to CDS to account for the communication of ideology in linguistic discourse. This approach is predicated on an argument from Cognitive Linguistics which suggests that understanding language involves the construction of multimodal mental representations, the properties of which can be approached within frameworks of multimodal social semiotics. Specifically, this article shows how spatial organisation and orientation feature in our linguistic understanding of certain grammatical constructions and, consequently, what evaluative functions those constructions covertly confer. Traditionally, the direction of influence between linguistic and multimodal forms of discourse analysis is unidirectional, with the former informing the latter but not the other way around. This article represents a reversal of this orthodoxy.