The relationship between ideology and language, a central topic in social studies of language, inspires the study of sociology, history, politics, and literary criticism. A fifteen-year labor of one of the world's leading pragmatists, this book uses the tools, methods, and theories of pragmatics and discourse analysis to introduce a new framework for the investigation of ideology in written language. With examples drawn systematically from a corpus of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French and British textbooks on colonial history, in particular the “Indian Mutiny” (1857), this book provides useful research materials and also serves as an outstanding guideline for collecting empirical research data on ideology.

In the introduction, Verschueren sketches the monograph's purpose and structure and clarifies the topic of ideology by presenting anecdotes relating to underlying patterns of meaning, frames of interpretation, world views, and common forms of thought and explanation. Ch. 1 presents the study's theoretical underpinnings and clarifies how normative, common-sense ideology is a fully-integrated, discursive, sociocultural, and cognitive phenomenon. It points out discrepancies between ideology and direct experience, and between implicit ideological meaning and what a person is willing to say explicitly. The underlying assumption is that the most visible manifestations of ideology are in language use, which itself reflects and constructs ideological meaning. Ch. 2 introduces pragmatics-based rules for engaging with language use and ideology in order to support data-driven empirical research and emphasizes the importance of formulating researchable questions. In his research methodology, Verschueren clearly illustrates the value of collecting an appropriate amount of coherent horizontally and vertically varied data. Ch. 3 presents the general guidelines and practical procedures followed during the process of investigation. Verscheuren's methods and insights are clearly grounded in the general theory of linguistic pragmatics, which focuses on the context of data and the dynamics of meaning construction in relation to social structures, processes, and relations. The author employs a wide range of pragmatic elements in his analysis of ideology, including utterers and interpreters, the involved social settings, linguistic channels, person deixis, intertextual links, rhetorical patterns, and other linguistic carriers of implicit meaning. The analytical framework covers syntactic, textual, and sociocultural levels. Because Verschueren deems it essential never to jump from the observation of a form to its interpretation or to equate form with function, his impressive work necessarily embodies a comparative and contrastive approach to the study of ideology.

This book can serve as a valuable analytical tool in language-, discourse-, and communication-oriented programs, as it addresses a broad domain of disciplines including linguistics, history, sociology, anthropology, and political science. With its orderly presentation of theses, rules, guidelines, and procedures, as well as the caveats in the appendix and the compendium of excerpts analyzed by the author, it is also highly recommended as a textbook.