The article focuses on Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its recontextualisation 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. Having discussed the dynamics of the threat construction process and its role in shaping public attitudes to migration and policies related to it across time and space, we proceed to analyse Powell’s speech in terms of lexical, grammatical, and discursive fear-inciting devices and strategies. While doing so we draw on the insights from neuroscientific research (...) on the role of lexis in fear stimulation and functional-cognitive models of grammatical structure. The second part of our analysis is meant to demonstrate how the semiotic potential of cyberspace and social media, along with multimodal integration of various forms, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity they enable, endow fear-inciting discourse with new spatiotemporal and affective qualities. To this end we examine one of the most popular YouTube videos making “Rivers of Blood” speech part of its anti-immigration stance. (shrink)

In an important article, Chris Hart makes the case that CDA needs to draw on a wider range of theoretical sources in Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Science, giving particular attention to Evolutionary Psychology. While I support Hart’s case for this approach to CDA, and also support his argument, as a corrective to Chilton, that Evolutionary Psychology actually shows the need for something like CDA, this present article advances three further points, aimed to supplement the cognitive approach to CDA. The first (...) is that CDA could fruitfully draw on Cognitive Linguistics in a more detailed way than it has hitherto, and in particular on work that articulates Cognitive Linguistics with Cognitive Psychology of the kind developed by Tomasello. The second is that the insights of Habermas, much mentioned in CDA, need to be better integrated within a linguistic approach to CDA. The third and most important point is that the question of the underlying moral values of the critical stance in CDA now need to be explicated in view of the global context in which CDA operates. I also show, using Hart’s own data, how values are presupposed in many types of utterance. Hart is right to focus on evidentials in his data, as evidence of the critical abilities of human communicators. But there is something important missing for CDA to explore further: the presence of contestable values. (shrink)