Language and Ideology

This chapter builds upon the basics of language structure and functions (Chapters 2–9) to
demonstrate how texts (spoken or written, long or short) present a particular view of the world
which reflects the ideological position of one (or more) of the perceived producers of the text.
The chapter takes a neutral view of what ideology means, seeing it as referring to sets of values
(and also, in some cases, beliefs) that are held by a group of people, often a society as a whole.
You will be introduced to the framework of critical stylistics, which allows you to analyse the
hidden and implicit ideologies inherent in textual construction. The basis of this framework is
the ‘textual-conceptual function’ which demonstrates how the text is constructing different
aspects of the world of the text by processes such as naming, negating, hypothesizing and
enumerating. This approach shares with critical discourse analysis (CDA) the idea that ideology
is present in all texts, but unlike CDA it is politically neutral rather than taking an explicitly
socialist or Marxist stance in itself.
15.1 INTRODUCTION
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Although we tend to assume that there is some kind of abstract linguistic system in place,
underpinning the things we say and write, linguistics has long recognized that there are
also discrepancies between this ‘idealized’ system which is made up of items (phonemes,
morphemes, words, phrases, clause elements etc.) and the rules for how they combine into
texts (the phonological rules and the grammar) – and the way in which the system is
‘realized’ when it is used. Famously, Saussure (see also Chapter 1), often seen as the founder
of modern linguistics, labelled this distinction (in French) langue (language) and parole
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