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Author biography

Paul Chilton is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is a cognitive linguist and critical discourse analyst who gained his undergraduate and doctoral
degrees at the University of Oxford. His books include The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppede,
Language and the Nuclear Arms Debate (ed.), Security Metaphors, Analysing Political
Discourse: Theory and Practice. He is currently writing a book on his geometry-based
Discourse Space Theory and another outlining his critical re-assessment of CDA. He
also acts as a consultant cognitive linguist for NGOs, charities and other organizations.

Discourse analysis, cognition and evidentials

Louis de Saussure

University of Neuchtel, Switzerland

Abstract
This article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDAs lack of attention to cognitive
science (or evolutionary psychology). From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse
analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what
cognitive (thus naturalistic) approaches have to offer, in particular as regards the automatic
processing of utterances and the subsequent non-conscious evaluation of contents vis-a-vis
previously held beliefs. I regard the epistemological tension in CDA as stemming from a wider
tension of the same sort affecting social science in general. Considering discourse as a process
of interpretation and evaluation, I address briefly the influence of evidentiality as a pragmatic
category in persuasive discourse and conclude that the uptake of new beliefs on the basis of
discourse is oriented towards the maximization of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson.

Keywords
cognitive pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, evidentiality, persuasion, understanding
Look who speaks (my late father)

Corresponding author:
Louis de Saussure, University of Neuchtel, Institute of Language and Communication, Espace Louis Agassiz
1, CH-2000 Neuchtel, Switzerland.
Email: louis.desaussure@unine.ch

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1. Introduction
Some recent works in critical discourse analysis (CDA) call for an epistemological
change. A reflection of this is to be found in Harts article (this issue), where he both
pleads for an infusion of cognitive or evolutionary psychology (EP) into CDA and details
the impact of evidentiality on the persuasive efficiency of discourses; he finds his inspiration in a range of works but in particular in the recent paper by Sperber et al. (2010) on
epistemic vigilance. The central question that underlies the worries expressed in these
recent works (see also Chilton, 2005a; Hart, 2010; OHalloran, 2003; Oswald, 2010) is
whether CDA should (and can) adapt vis-a-vis these EP newcomers on the field of
persuasion in discourse, a crucial object of study for CDA.1
In what follows, I discuss this issue as a cognitive pragmaticist. I advocate that the
current tension within CDA reflects a broader tension in the social sciences, which is
about the import of naturalistic approaches to human behaviour. I then consider what
cognitive pragmatics bring into the picture through a short discussion of meaning,
understanding and believing, with some reference to notions such as evidentiality as a
pragmatic category.
CDA, as I understand it, is very much about the social effects of discourses as reproducing and shaping ideologies seen as socially constructed representations; these considerations are much needed, today as always but today in particular. Yet, if not carefully
drawn from facts, methods and consistent theories, such considerations will always
appear to the sceptical opinions from biased intellectuals prompt to find in the empirical
material the confirmation of a priori conceptions (Widdowson, 20042). In the matter of
discourse studies, a serious epistemological standard should imply that one cannot
rightfully jump to broad social and ethical considerations on discourse before establishing what the part of cognitive processes of understanding and believing are in the overall process of social influence and spreading of ideas mediated by discourse. I am
returning to these concepts below, but I think that Harts attempt to explain facts of
influence through the lens of meaning, here of evidentiality, is the kind of approach that
CDA and persuasion studies can benefit from although with some nuances.

2. A naturalistic approach to discourse

In the course of its development across various schools of thought, CDA established
itself as a broad domain anchoring in social thinking and widely adopting the mainstream scientific attitudes of social science in the 20th century. Roughly (because these
attitudes are differently assumed in a great number of scholarly trends), they imply,
among others, the following assumptions, more or less explicitly stated.
i) Human and social behaviour, and thus human consent to socially constructed representations, is out of the realm of natural causes and thus escapes from the epistemologies
of naturalistic perspectives and, as a consequence, of EP and philosophy of mind.
A weaker version of this is that natural causes to such things are intrinsically impossible
to study, or that they play little role.
To this, EP opposes the idea that human behaviour, including the adoption by humans
of beliefs and ideologies, is determined, not in all details (there is a strata of relativity in
those facts), but at a crucial fundamental level, by the architecture of the brain resulting

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from evolution, any sociocultural fact being a parameter (and a result) from these (social
facts are results of the cognition of individuals). In that sense, EP endorses a deterministic position, which seems incompatible with mainstream CDA. Yet it needs to be distinguished between what can be investigated by deterministic science in this perspective
and what facts are outside its scope (at least for the moment); as regards discourse and
communication, this implies a difference between studying the speaker and studying the
hearer, as I will suggest later.
ii) Whereas the human brain is the primary locus of behaviour, questions about how
the brain works when processing information and adapting to social environments is
widely banned, not only because action is supposedly shaped exclusively by social
contexts but also because the brain is considered an inscrutable black box. To this,
expectedly, EP opposes the possibility of studying cognitive activity not only theoretically,
but also empirically (in particular experimentally).
A noticeable exception to this, mentioned by Hart, is the considerable infusion of
cognitive linguistics (CL) into CDA. The success of it shows that cognitive processes
cant be ignored by discourse analysis. Even if considering that metaphors are conventional and culture-specific constructs which is debatable to some extent it remains
that stable mental processes are exploited by metaphors in a particular way in the very
processing of discourse (otherwise it becomes complicated to explain that they are
persuasive), which entails that intercultural variation is epiphenomenal to a hard-core
universal mechanism. It is striking in this respect that proponents of CL like Chilton and
Hart are among the most concerned with the need for more infusion of cognitive science
into CDA. Yet, at the same time, it may seem astonishing that Hart (this issue) is anxious
to make a precision when he advocates for some infusion of EP into CDA. This, he
says, is not a biologically determinist position as some might charge. Besides the fact
that this precision shows how much determinism is banned from CDA, the need for this
precision illuminates also that there is indeed a tension between a natural biological type
of model and anti-determinism as a supposed principle of social life. What if this tension
could be resolved only when the deterministic model is fine-grained enough to wipe off
what simply wrongly appears to us as non-deterministic processes, or, rather, when the
model delimits the zone where predictions are impossible?
It would be interesting to know more about Harts position on the problem of determinism, but let me make a point. Clearly, what a speaker is going to say is unpredictable
(even the conventions of speech use cant predict whatever content; we can merely, with
some indeterminacy, surmise a preferred type of speech act); on the contrary, what a
hearer is going to interpret is clearly predictable on the simple basis of the concerned
utterance and a limited set of contextual assumptions. We may make wrong predictions
on this occasionally, but there are right predictions that can be made if the model and the
data are adequate. But there is more: speakers themselves predict what their interlocutor
is going to interpret, otherwise they cant hope to pass on a message unless by chance.
Therefore, speakers have a model of human natural understanding, according to which
they shape their communication (unconsciously), and which belongs to theory of mind
(ToM). This is the reason for which many pragmatic theories of the (post-)Gricean tradition, now cognitive theories of meaning, focus on the process of understanding (as
Relevance Theory) and not on that of new speech acts. For discourse analysis, the invited
conclusion of this attitude is that, if the choice of words and linguistic structures is not

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innocent, as posited by functional linguistics (see Halliday, 1985, for instance) and rightfully consensually admitted, it is primarily because these linguistic forms are destined to
trigger cognitive effects according to ToM.3
But what is at stake with CDA is one step further: from a solid prediction of understanding, can we go up to a prediction on believing (which includes also being trapped
into some ideological set of beliefs, consciously or not)? Either the answer is a clear no,
and then the conclusion is that accepting a belief on the basis of an utterance within a
discourse and a context is a totally erratic and random type of event; or the answer may
be that believing is a type of situation which is only favoured by this or that factor, but
then one wonders what it is to favour if not the confession of a deterministic process still
unknown; the third answer is yes to some extent (a full and plain yes seems unrealistic,
given the amount of factors at play), but then deterministic aspects must be part of the
theory and admitted at a core level of the whole process, and the scope of deterministic
theory must be set, relativism rightfully expanding below its border in terms of arbitrary
and conventional parameters. The fact is that I cant choose to understand or to believe.
I dont apply any kind of conscious decision-making procedure or evaluation when I
understand a sentence or a discourse, when I derive an implicature or extract a presupposition, and, obviously, when I come to believe a new proposition: this is out of the
scope of will.4 Therefore, these events cant happen without a stable natural determinist
core of causalities, whatever complex it may be, since when these events happen, my
mind works them out without me exerting any control over them. Needless to say, a
deterministic attitude forces the scope of the concerned scientific domain to settle. This
is why cognitive pragmatics, for instance (the type of which being Relevance Theory),
has settled its scope over understanding and more recently believing, not over determinations at work when speakers involved in a conversation prefer, choose, or are anyway
driven, to say (this is the work of conversational analysis).
At this stage, it should be stated that if considering that CDA aims at doing critical
discourse analysis, the import of such approaches must be more than the advance of
science. If there are grounds ultimately neurological grounds for assessing that
some discursive patterns exploit biases that are as unavoidable as, say, optical illusions
(Pohl, 2004, rightfully calls cognitive illusions the cognitive biases known as heuristics
in the tradition of Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; see also Caverni et al., 1990), and that
the devices that exploit them (for example, metaphor, but there are many others) are
brought to light, then the aim of enhancing the critical literacy of people will be better
reached than it has been, if at all, within mainstream CDA.5
Earlier, I suggested that the study of understanding is central to the project of discourse analysis. I might put it like this: the study of meaning is central to the project of
a cognitive approach to discourse, in particular to the project of better knowing the
influence of communication on belief change or reproduction. This calls for a definition
of discourse and some examples of how persuasion works in discourse from the
cognitive pragmatic viewpoint.

3. Discourse, understanding, believing

There is an intrinsic link between understanding what is communicated understanding
a discourse and getting to believe its contents: both are automatic and uncontrollable

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processes, and believing is based on evidences that intervene at the level of understanding already.6 Processing utterances means putting in relation many pieces of information
in order to draw conclusions. Many of them are already held assumptions about the
world, the context and the speaker. Among these pieces of information, some are not
only about what is to be understood but also about what is to be believed; these involve
epistemic and evidential assumptions. Again, some are communicated and some are
previously held. The process that goes from a verbal stimulus to a belief is, however,
managed by various devices of evaluation (call it critical module) where some assumptions intervene, such as suspicion, guesses about the speakers intentions and interests
which might derogate anticipation of competence and benevolence, etc. But the hearer
can very well fail to notice them, not only because of lack of knowledge, but also because
of low-level processes taking place in the mind, which guarantee efficient communication in everyday settings but leave open a possibility for manipulation (see Chilton,
2005b; De Saussure, 2005; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Oswald, 2010). Many of these
biases are active in communication, some do affect the processing of utterances, others
affect the context (for example, when a repeated information tends to integrate our cognitive environment by means of the mere exposure effect; Zajonc, 1968). All this, it
must be emphasized, is a process taking place utterance after utterance, therefore not
over whole discourses at once.
Cognitive pragmatics rejects the idea that discourses are mere structures of contents
tied together with markers of cohesion, and that therefore discourses are wholes best
studied by a phenomenological ex post analysis. Reboul and Moeschler (1998) define
discourse as a non-arbitrary suite of utterances (my emphasis); in the same vein, Chafe
(1987) expresses that discourses are best studied as processes (discussed in De Saussure,
2007; see also Wilson, 1998). The reason for this is that utterances are never processed
without the preceding utterances forming a context, that is, a set of elements which,
together with the current utterance, lead to the deduction of inferences, in turn entering
further deductions when processing the next utterance. As such, the understanding of a
discourse is nothing more than understanding the flow of utterances composing it till the
end. Furthermore, Reboul and Moeschler (1998) insightfully explain that what makes a
series of utterances compose a discourse is that they converge towards a global meaning
intention (or several of them) on the part of the speaker. Relevance Theory suggests an
overarching principle managing the processing of communicated information: a path of
least effort is followed in search of compensation in terms of cognitive information
(Sperber and Wilson, 1995).
Evidentiality seems one of the most crucial pieces of information at work in the interface between understanding and believing. Let me quickly take two short examples.
In 1999, French journalist Philippe Vandel went on the streets of a city with the full
professional apparatus, camera and microphone, and interrogated people: Experts have
calculated that New Years Day 2000 will be on a Friday the 13th, are you afraid of
this?; people (at least those in the show) didnt notice the inconsistency and answered
that they were, or not, afraid, and for which reasons.7 Apart from the fact that online
utterances are less subject to critical evaluation, there are two components in this type of
manipulation: shallow processing of Friday the 13th reinterpreted as some dangerous
day in order to re-establish consistency (Oswald, 2010; see Allott, 2005, about shallow
processing in relation to political discourse) and evidentiality (experts have said

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something). No doubt shallow processing was reinforced by evidentiality, and no doubt

either that such things, although less evidently of course, occur in ordinary political
discourse everyday.
But if the evidence on which the information relies is unsaid, it may be strongly presupposed (or implied8).9 Things are similar with epistemic modality.
A case in point in order to show that epistemic features can be left inferred as assumptions on the commitment of the speaker is to be found in reported speech and thought
(Morency et al., 2008), which involve a representation by the speaker of a representation
by a third party. Reported speech is precisely a case of (indirect) evidentiality that raises
complex issues. In the example above, the segment experts have calculated that P implies
that experts are committed to P as a mathematical fact. Usually, we treat utterances such
as Experts believe that P just as we treat things like Mary said its time to go which normally
entails that it is time to go on the basis of the expertise of Mary on the topic. This inference changes significantly if the speaker says Its time to go, except if it is contextually
manifest that he just spoke with Mary; in that case, evidentiality does exist as a pragmatic
feature of communication, although inferred on the basis of contextual knowledge.10
Similarly, if a representative of a government expresses (1):
(1) The country faces a budgetary crisis.

There is inferential evidence, here presupposed, that a staff of experts have established
(1) as true (some would speak here of intertextuality). If the crisis is not budgetary
but rather financial, hence not due to state budget mismanagement by the previous
government but rather to the failure of private financial institutions, it can be left unnoticed because of processes basically similar to that of the Friday the 13th case: budgetary is shallow processed because the utterance must be consistent with other knowledge
and expectations of relevance (the economical jargon makes it even more easy to go),
sustained by an evidential presupposition. Some economists can see the problem, but in
the absence of cautious examination, many people wont, except if they have some
knowledge about it, and, I would stress, some motivation to think about the contents
and the speakers intentions.

4. Conclusion: Relevance to believe

Such knowledge on how we process utterances, just as knowledge about possible hidden
intentions of the speaker or simply about the competence of the speaker (my late father
used to tell me to always wonder who is speaking), can be thought of as contextual
assumptions among others, but of a meta-type. Evidentiality, if considered as one of
these contextual assumptions, and not only as a linguistic type of marker, then enters a
calculus of relevance too; yet its outcome is ultimately about the relevance there would
be in adopting the concerned belief, that is, the positive impact of that new belief on my
personal set of representations. That is, in sum: relevance to believe. This impact is very
important in specific situations, in particular risky ones: if, among the background
assumptions I hold, I consider that we are in a dangerous crisis, it may be very useful

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to the speaker that I find relevance in assuming it as budgetary so that I accept the
budgetary solutions proposed by experts to solve the crisis.
Notes
1. Van Dijk (2008, 2011) also addresses this issue in his attempt to reconcile a mental model
with a context model.
2. After a long series of previous critical works targeting not only CDA but various approaches
to language use.
3. What the right model of ToM should be (simulation, empathy, theory-theory, etc.) is not my
concern here.
4. Obviously this holds for wishful thinking too which is not about conscious will.
5. One may object that if we are deterministically subject to such illusions, then they are unavoidable. Here a comparison with optical illusions is enlightening: being subject to optical
illusions leads to believing in what you see only inasmuch as you dont know that it is an
illusion. Thus the import of EP and cognitive science is to bring about a reflexive apparatus
that helps hearers to identify those illusions as manipulative. Knowing the results of scientific
research should here suffice, just as knowing that radioactive material has specific effects on
the human body. Anyone as a citizen, not only scientists, and certainly often far better than
scientists, is able to understand that it is therefore undesirable.
6. There are other, crucial, factors that orient towards believing, among which, perhaps most
crucially, emotion and desire to believe what fit best with our assumptions, comfort and
worldview. I am leaving these aside here (see however Clment, 2006).
7. Steve Oswald brought this case to my attention in 2005. He extensively explains it in Oswald
(2010).
8. If evidentiality is the purpose of communication, then its an implicature (for Gricean
pragmatics, it would then be triggered on the basis of the maxim of quality).
9. Some linguists might oppose this point of view as they count evidentiality as an explicit type
of linguistic marking. Yet I consider here evidentiality as a pragmatic, not a purely linguistic,
category (see De Saussure, forthcoming).
10. Epistemic must can be discussed in this regard: must expresses necessity, but an utterance like
John must be at the swimming pool expresses the necessity only of an inference on the basis
of (incomplete) premises available to the speaker, hence the usual idea that epistemic must
indicates inferential evidentiality.

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Author biography
Louis de Saussure is Professor of Linguistics and Discourse Analysis at the University of
Neuchtel. He formerly taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Universities of Geneva, Lugano and
Fribourg. He was visiting researcher at University College London and at the French
Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Nancy. He pursues research
mostly in the fields of pragmatics, French linguistics and discourse analysis, all envisaged from a cognitive pragmatics perspective.

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