A Sociocognitive Approach to Agency Framing in David Cameron’s 2010 Pre-election Discourse

Abstract

Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis as an approach to the analysis of discourses, this paper explores the concept of agency in a corpus of David Cameron’s 2010 pre-election speeches. The analysis attempts to unveil the social representations present in the discourse of the British Conservative Party leader by focusing on the discourse-cognition-society interface. The study uses Van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach and Systemic Functional Linguistics as a methodological framework. The focus is on the discourse structures of personal pronouns, transitivity and nominalisation as discourse structures framing agency. The study uses qualitative as well as quantitative tools and takes into account the context of the speeches. The analysis reveals that by means of interacting with the audience on common knowledge and attitudes, Cameron constructs a collective agency to win votes and define a Conservative ideology.