Vilification of the enemy: Different enemies, the same linguistic strategies

Abstract

Cognitive Discourse Analysis is one of the new trends within Cognitive Linguistics, now gaining momentum. It combines the insights from the first generation CL, which focused on the individual cognitive processes and, among other things, emphasised the role of metaphorical processing in cognition with Critical Discourse Analysis, which concentrated on elucidating the links between discourse and society. This paper attempts to identify the recurrent patterns of enemy vilification in war reports and commentaries in two newspapers: the Polish Trybuna Ludu and the British The Times in the 1980s and in 2001. This crosslanguage and cross-conflict analysis hopes to isolate the recurrent linguistic patterns characteristic of war discourse and to shed some light on their social function.