Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

3 Analysing 
political discourse
The need to account for the interdependence of socio-cultural and linguistic 
practices when analysing political discourse motivates the cross-disciplinary 

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approach and the eclectic research methodology typically applied in political 
discourse analysis. This study is no exception. It applies essentially qualitative 
methods which are rooted in the discourse analysis tradition. While drawing 
on recent linguistics anthropology research into the role of narrative accounts 
for the construction of a political identity (Duranti 2006), this investigation 
uses the analytical tools of genre analysis (Swales 2004, Bhatia 1993) for the 
interpretation of rhetorical, formal and functional choices in context-sensitive 
discourse. In addition, it uses insights from critical discourse analysis in the 
discussion of the potential of linguistic devices to construct identities (e.g. van 
Dijk 1997, 2006, Wodak 2007a, 2007b), to categorize social actors (van Leeuwen 
1996) and to legitimize political values, identities and ideologies (Chilton 2004, 
van Leeuwen 2007). Thus, drawing on Chilton’s (2004) essentially cognitive 
approach, the coherence of the discourse world represented in political discourse 
can be interpreted on the basis of the positioning of political actors with respect 
to a particular place, time and social group, seen as a ‘deictic centre’ shared 
by the in-group and associated with the values of true and right. This defines 
the ideological viewpoint for the evaluation and categorization of social actors, 
values and spatial-temporal settings as proximal or distal, true or false and right 
or wrong.