Analysing political discourse does not merely address issues concerning either politics of language or languages of politics; it offers practical analyses of actual specimens of political text and talk. The discourses analyzed, in both the British and international arenas, include political interviews, parliamentary language, politicians' speeches, and discourses that concern foreigners and religion. The analysis is linguistically oriented, grounded in a theory of language and politics. In this review, I shall first give an overview of the linguistic theory on which the author bases his analysis and then select two actual analyses for illustration. Finally, I shall say a few words about the style of this volume.

The theoretical groundwork constitutes Part I of the volume, which consists of four chapters. Chaps. 1 and 2, “Politics and language” and “Language and politics,” respectively, dwell on the role language plays in politics. In chap. 1, the author emphasizes that doing politics is predominantly constituted in language by recognizing that “however politics is defined, there is a linguistic, discursive and communicative dimension” (p. 4). In chap. 2, the author briefly examines Grice's Cooperative Principle, Sperber & Wilson's relevance theory, and Chomsky's generative linguistics in order to formulate three principles for a cognitive approach to political discourse. The first is that language and political behavior can be thought of as based on the cognitive endowments of the human mind rather than simply as “social practices.” The second is that language and social behavior are closely intertwined, probably in innate mechanisms or innately developing mechanisms of the mind and probably as a result of evolutionary adaptations. The third principle is that human linguistic and social abilities are not a straitjacket; rather, language is linked to the human cognitive ability to engage in free critique and criticism (28–29). The following two chapters consider the mechanisms of language in detail, with chap. 3 concentrated on the role of language in the interaction between individuals in social groups and chap. 4 on the representation of state affairs.

Through interaction people signal social roles, boundaries, and bonds. Thus, in the examination of speech acts, communicative cooperation, and implicatures in chap. 3, Chilton attempts to connect these mainstream theories with social and political categories. According to him, “felicity conditions” can be best explained in terms of social, political, and judicial organization. Similarly, the concept of cooperation is likely to require explication in terms of social intelligence. “Even implicatures, which in many respects can be dealt with inside the domain of cognition, nonetheless seems [sic] to involve, at least for particularized implicature, a multiplicity of background knowledge that includes social and political values” (42). As a step further, Chilton examines Habermas's validity claims. The Habermasian epistemological framework, he points out, holds that knowledge is not a neutral representation of an objective world “out there,” but is realized through language in use, determined by interests. The validity claim of “rightness,” for example, partly means that the performing of speech acts is grounded in an implicit claim on the part of the speaker to inhabit a particular social or political role and to possess a particular authority. In this line of argument, Chilton characterizes three strategies by which utterers manage their interests: coercion, legitimization and delegitimization, and representation and misrepresentation.

Chap. 4 contains more of Chilton's ideas concerning his cognitive approach to political discourse. He first introduces the term “frame,” which is defined as “an area of experience” in a particular culture (51). Then he illustrates the cognitive nature of metaphor by pointing out that the source domains that are innate or required in development provide a source for conceptualization. Another concept the author dwells on is “discourse worlds,” the mental space established by coherent chains of propositions in the discourse and entertained by the utterer as “real.” He believes that overall discourse coherence is achieved by the recurrence of, and links between, the different referents of the discourse world. As a consequence, he develops a device to “filter” out the linguistic expressions that set up the recurring discourse referents and prompt for their thematic roles and relations. Finally in this chapter, Chilton formulates his three-dimensional analytical framework: space (s), time (t), and modality (m). He suggests that discourse is based on the expectation that anyone mentally processing it will locate argument and predicates by reference to points on the three axes s, t, and m. The coordinates are established in the discourse as part of speaker's reality-space, the space that speaker expects hearer to know and accept (60–61). This analytical framework and the strategies characterized in chap. 3 are applied to the analyses of the specimens of political discourse in the following chapters. Here I shall review two actual analyses.

Chap. 7 offers a strategy analysis of political speech given in April 1968 by Enoch Powell, a maverick Conservative politician who presumes an interracial conflict in Britain as a result of excessive immigration. Legitimization functions first in terms of epistemic claims, backed up by lists, statistics, and sources that the speaker presumes the hearer will accept as authoritative. It also functions in terms of deontic claims. In the speech, the speaker seeks to ground his position in moral feelings or intuitions that no one will challenge. His claim of rationality, morality, and veracity guarantees his authority to make assertions about immigration and the behavior of immigrants. The legitimization is a kind of coercion, but some stretches in this speech are strategically designed predominantly to coerce. For example, the utterance “In this country in fifteen or twenty years' time the black man will have the whip over the white man” may induce fear by making truth claims, in the form of predictions, about causal effects. Powell here actually predicts that uncontrolled immigration will cause damaging events. In terms of speech acts, the author points out, Powell is issuing warnings; in terms of contextualized political language use, he is using a coercive strategy insofar as he is (conceivably) causing fear of contingent events and actors involved in them (118). This is emotive coercion, and Powell is also using propositional coercion, which involves different forms of implied meaning and the propositions that hearers are induced to entertain in the course of processing the current discourse. The result is that of “forced inferences”; that is, in reading or hearing Powell, one cannot do otherwise than make certain momentary online assumptions or accept certain implications. As for the representational dimension of language use, the construction of reality by making truth claims about particular configurations of categories and events, Chilton notes that actions, effects, and recipients are not always expressed overtly, but are bundled up inside noun phrases (NPs). The nonspecified agent of a passive construction is also recognized as a covert expression of the speaker's proposition.

Chaps. 8, 9, and 10, which contain analyses of political discourses in the global arena, mostly apply the three-dimensional analytical framework. I shall take the analysis of President Clinton's address on 24 March 1999 as an illustration. The opening sentences of the speech are as follows:

To analyze the president's representation of the world, the author positions the speaker in the deictic center and other entities (arguments of predicates) and processes (predicates) in relation to him along the axes of space (s), time (t) and modality (m). In terms of m, the value for these sentences seem to be “proximate” – that is, actions referred to are asserted as true (and right) without modification. In terms of t, they are asserted to have taken place within the mutually understood time zone denoted by “today.” As for s, the author separates two spaces. In one, proximate forces join more distant but still relatively proximate allies and joint attacks against distant entities (this space is built up by predicate “join” and verbal noun “strike”). The second space is a distant geopolitical area (built up by “brutality”). Two spaces are lexically linked by “responsible for”: The syntax of the linguistic expressions (mostly an inferred anaphoric chain) links one of the arguments in the first space to a predication in the second space (140–41; also see Figure 8.1 on p. 141).

Chilton's analysis of political discourse is not concentrated on the metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and transitivity politicians often exploit, as is the case with Beard 2000; rather, the analysis takes a cognitive approach which is different from some linguists' (e.g. van Dijk 2002) as far as political discourse analysis is concerned. This approach, through a novel application of ideas derived from vector geometry, proves effective in the analysis of language in use, and particularly in political discourse, since political actors are always situated with respect to a particular time, place, and social group. Because it is done from a new angle, the approach is formulated in a careful way. In fact, Chilton adopts a moderate style in formulating his ideas. One finds throughout the book phrases like “seem to be” and “this is of course not to say,” and even in the concluding chapter, “Towards a theory of language and politics,” the author tentatively formulates as many as twelve propositions regarding political discourse instead of offering any real concluding remarks. What this final chapter leaves us with is a platform for the future development of the author's stimulating and sometimes provocative ideas.