An Exploration of Muhammadu Bukhari’s Socio-Political Cognition through Stylistic Analysis

Political discourse is a recent but increasingly exciting field of study. The political discourse offers much scope for interdisciplinary research. This current study is a stylistic analysis of the Inaugural speech delivered by Nigerian President Muhammadu Bukhari in Abuja on 29th May 2015. The current study aims to signify the role of Stylistics in CDA to unleash socio-political cognition in speeches. This qualitative research owing to its interdisciplinary nature draws on stylistics and critical discourse analysis as well. Teun A. Van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach is used to analyze the mental models underlying linguistic structures made explicit through stylistic analysis. The stylistic analysis is conducted on lexical and grammatical levels, but cohesion and speech acts have also been highlighted in the findings and discussion part. The study explores how stylistic devices are used to create a rhetorical effect and how this effect qualifies for being persuasive. The stylistic analysis reconnoiters the linguistic patterns, and CDA leads to the ideologies that shape these patterns. This study strengthens the belief that both stylistics and critical discourse analysis have great scope and power in revealing discursive practices of hegemony and persuasion.

Premise Disputes and Political Ideology

A substantial body of scholarship highlights the role of core values as elements of liberalism–conservatism. However, researchers have yet to fully appreciate the contribution of premises, or abstract descriptive beliefs. This disjuncture has occurred despite the fact that for centuries, philosophers have used premises about human nature and society to ground their religious, political and economic theories. In the observational and experimental studies described in this article, the authors examine the extent to which such premise disputes stand independently from value conflicts as ideological ingredients. The findings suggest that premises are distinct and meaningful elements of political cognition, analogous in importance to several well-worn values.

LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF FORMATION OF POLITICAL COGNITION IN THE POLITICAL MEDIA DISCOURSE (BASED ON THE US DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DECLARATION ON THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION)

В статье рассматривается вопрос о формировании политической когниции в политическом тексте жанра «декларация», являющейся структурным элементом медиадискурса. Систематизация результатов изучения принципов формирования политической когниции в Декларации независимости США (The Declaration of Independence) и англоязычном варианте Декларации о создании Шанхайской Организации Сотрудничества (The Declarationon the Establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) осуществляется на основе сравнительно-сопоставительного метода и методики графических систематизаторов Д. Халперна. В свою очередь, особую значимость при формировании и организации коммуникационного процесса приобретает лингвистический знак в сообщении и информационном потоке, что говорит о масштабности жизни социального субъекта, знаний о реальной действительности. Именно языковые навыки позволяют формировать настоящую политическую когницию. В результате мы наблюдаем, что политический медиадискурс позволяет проследить, выявить политическую когницию как некую модель, которую участники политического процесса конструируют в своей памяти для того, чтобы понять истинное значение и важность информации. В результате анализа установлено, что в качестве исходных правил формирования политической когниции выступают правила размещения лингвистического знака в информационном потоке. Положение знака в информационном пространстве - пространстве сообщительности - влияет на конструирование социальной реальности в определенный исторический период. The article deals with the formation of the political cognition in the political text of the «declaration» genre, which is the structural element of the media discourse. The systematization of the results of studying the principles of the formation of the political cognition in The Declaration of Independence and the English version of The Declaration on the Establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is carried out on the basis of the comparative methodology and D. Halpern’s graphic systematizers. In its turn, the linguistic sign in the message and information flow becomes particularly important in the formation and organization of the communication process, which indicates the scale of the social subject’s life, awareness of the current situation. It is language skills that allow us to form a real political cognition. As a result, we observe that political media discourse allows us to trace political cognition as a model that participants in the political process construct in their memory in order to understand the true meaning and importance of information. The analysis revealed that the initial rules for the formation of the political cognition are the rules for placing a linguistic sign in the information flow. The position of the sign in the information space - the space of communicativeness - affects the construction of social reality in a specific historical period.

Political Neuroscience: Understanding How the Brain Makes Political Decisions

Recent research in political psychology and biopolitics has begun to incorporate theory and methods from cognitive neuroscience. The emerging interdisciplinary field of political neuroscience (or neuropolitics) is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying political information processing and decision making. Most of the existing work in this area has utilized structural magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or electroencephalography, and focused on understanding areas of the brain commonly implicated in social and affective neuroscience more generally. This includes brain regions involved in affective and evaluative processing, such as the amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as regions involved in social cognition (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex [PFC]), decision making (e.g., dorsolateral PFC), and reward processing (e.g., ventral striatum). Existing research in political neuroscience has largely focused on understanding candidate evaluation, political participation, and ideological differences. Early work in the field focused simply on examining neural responses to political stimuli, whereas more recent work has begun to examine more nuanced hypotheses about how the brain engages in political cognition and decision making. While the field is still relatively new, this work has begun to improve our understanding of how people engage in motivated reasoning about political candidates and elected officials and the extent to which these processes may be automatic versus relatively more controlled. Other work has focused on understanding how brain differences are related to differences in political opinion, showing both structural and functional variation between political liberals and political conservatives. Neuroscientific methods are best used as part of a larger, multimethod research program to help inform theoretical questions about mechanisms underlying political cognition. This work can then be triangulated with experimental laboratory studies, psychophysiology, and traditional survey approaches and help to constrain and ensure that theory in political psychology and political behavior is biologically plausible given what we know about underlying neural architecture. This field will continue to grow, as interest and expertise expand and new technologies become available.

Partisanship and Political Cognition

George Washington warned in his farewell address that “the spirit of party ... is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.” Indeed, while many factors influence how citizens judge, reason, and make decisions about politics, parties and partisanship play an extraordinarily central role in political cognition. Party and partisanship color how individuals understand the political world in two broad ways. Partisan stereotypes, or how party labels call to mind a host of attributes about people and constituent groups, play an important role in cognition. Second, perhaps even more pronounced in a hyperpolarized political world, is the way in which party influences cognition through partisan identity, or one’s own attachment (or lack thereof) to one of the parties. This connects a party and co-partisans with one’s own self-concept and facilitates an us-versus-them mentality when making political judgments and decisions. Both cognitive pathways are often simultaneously operating and interacting with each other. While we can think about the role of party in terms of stereotypes or identities, the impact of partisanship on actual cognition often involves both, and it can have varied implications for the quality of political decision making. Because partisanship is central to the political world, particularly in democracies, it has been the subject of a variety of lines of inquiry attempting to explain its impact on voters’ decisions.

Unresolved Politics: Implicit Ambivalence and Political Cognition

This paper introduces a novel framework for understanding the relationship between implicit and explicit preferences and political cognition. Existing work in political psychology focuses primarily on comparing the main effects of implicit versus explicit attitude measures. This paper rethinks the role of implicit cognition by acknowledging the correspondence between implicit and explicit preferences (i.e., the distance between implicitly and explicitly measured attitudes). Data from the 2008 American National Election Study are used to examine implicit racial ambivalence, or the gap between one’s implicit and explicit racial preferences, as it exists in the United States. Results indicate implicit racial ambivalence, which has been shown to yield effortful thinking related to race, is negatively related to education and Need for Cognition, and predicts race-related policy attitudes as well as vote choice in the 2008 election. Furthermore, implicit ambivalence moderates the influence of ideology on political attitudes, including attitudes toward outcomes that are only covertly related to race and cannot be predicted directly by implicit or explicit racial attitudes alone.

Political neuroscience: Understanding how the brain makes political decisions

Recent research in political psychology and biopolitics has begun to incorporate theory and methods from cognitive neuroscience. The emerging interdisciplinary field of political neuroscience (or neuropolitics) is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying political information processing and decision making. Most of the existing work in this area has utilized structural magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or electroencephalography, and focused on understanding areas of the brain commonly implicated in social and affective neuroscience more generally. This includes brain regions involved in affective and evaluative processing, such as the amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as regions involved in social cognition (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex), decision making (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), and reward processing (e.g., ventral striatum). Existing research in political neuroscience has largely focused on understanding candidate evaluation, political participation, and ideological differences. Early work in the field focused simply on examining neural responses to political stimuli, whereas more recent work has begun to examine more nuanced hypotheses about how the brain engages in political cognition and decision making. While the field is still relatively new, this work has begun to improve our understanding of how people engage in motivated reasoning about political candidates and elected officials and the extent to which these processes may be automatic versus relatively more controlled. Other work has focused on understanding how brain differences are related to differences in political opinion, showing both structural and functional variation between political liberals and political conservatives. Neuroscientific methods are best used as part of a larger, multimethod research program to help inform theoretical questions about mechanisms underlying political cognition. This work can then be triangulated with experimental laboratory studies, psychophysiology, and traditional survey approaches and help to constrain and ensure that theory in political psychology and political behavior is biologically plausible given what we know about underlying neural architecture. This field will continue to grow, as interest and expertise expand and new technologies become available.