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A Critical and Cognitive Analysis of Political Discourse:

the TV debate on Scottish Independence

Module QXL 4443 – “Language and Communication”

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW ................................................................................................ 1

CONTEXT: THE REFERENDUM ON SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE ...................................................... 2

METAPHOR ................................................................................................................................. 3

ACTION CHAINS AND PROFILING ................................................................................................. 6

FORCE DYNAMICS ..................................................................................................................... 11

SUMMARY ................................................................................................................................ 13

PUBLICATION BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 15

APPENDIX 1: ALEX SALMOND’S SPEECH .................................................................................... 16

APPENDIX 2: ALISTAIR DARLING’S SPEECH ................................................................................ 16

Introduction and overview

The referendum on the independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom in

September 2014 was a highly controversial topic that initiated a wide public debate

throughout the UK. Opinions diverged widely and proponents of the two major

forces – those in favour of Scottish independence on the one hand, and those

opposed to it on the other – often became highly emotional on the subject.

It is therefore interesting to examine more closely the public discourse relating

to the topic of Scottish independence, thereby comparing examples of the two

standpoints, one taking a favourable stance, the other rejecting the idea. That is the

goal of this essay.

The methods which shall be used in order to analyse the discourse are inspired

by Cognitive Linguistics, which offers a unique perspective on the subject matter by

focusing attention on the question of how discourse interacts with the speaker’s and

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hearer’s cognitive processes. In particular we will examine in detail here the notions

of metaphor, action chains, profiling and force dynamics.

The first section of the essay describes briefly the context of the analysed discourse

by giving the background information necessary in order to fully understand the

goings-on surrounding the Scottish independence referendum, as well as describing

the subject matter of the essay (i.e. the analysed discourse) and putting this too in

context. Section 2 will then start the actual discourse analysis using the tool of

metaphor. Sections 3 and 4 have a similar structure, but use the alternative

Cognitive Linguistic tools of action chains and profiling, and then force dynamics.

Finally the results and findings will be summarised in section 5.

Context: The Referendum on Scottish Independence

In the year 1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I of England, King James VI of

Scotland inherited the English throne and became James I of England. The two

countries remained independent of each other, however, until the so-called ‘Acts of

Union’ finally unified the two countries in 1706 and 1707 to form the United

Kingdom of Great Britain.

In 1997, nearly three hundred years after the Acts of Union, the Labour Party

under Tony Blair gained power in the UK, and held a referendum on whether

Scotland should have its own parliament and thus gain more independence within

the UK. Nearly three quarters of voters voted in favour, and so in 1998 the new

Scottish parliament was created, with far-reaching powers within Scotland. This

process, which also simultaneously took place in Wales, is known as devolution.

In 2007, the Scottish National Party won the Scottish parliamentary elections

with the stated intention of holding a referendum on independence. However, the

SNP did not gain enough seats to pass the necessary laws. In 2011, the SNP finally

won an overall majority in the elections and subsequently commenced with the

preparations for a “fair, legal and decisive” referendum. The British parliament also

passed laws in order to make this possible. The referendum finally took place on 18

September 2014, with a majority of 55.3% of voters voting against Scottish

independence.

Prior to the referendum, two television debates took place and were broadcast

between Scotland’s SNP First Minister, Alex Salmond, and the Chairman of the

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“Better Together” campaign for continued union with Britain, Alistair Darling

(Labour). The debate that is to be analysed here is the second of these two, broadcast

on 25 August 2014. In this debate the contestants first made opening statements

and then took questions from the audience. Finally, each made a closing speech. The

material that shall be analysed here is the content of the two closing remarks. The

full text of these speeches can be found in the appendix.

Metaphor

The first aspect to be analysed here is metaphor. This particular ‘tool of

conceptualisation’ is the one which, of the three used in this text, has been most often

used previously in the area of discourse analysis, and very successfully. It is

particularly useful because it offers a very clear insight into the speaker’s ideological

point of view (Dirven et al. 2007, pp. 1224–1225).

Metaphor has played a central role in cognitive linguistics ever since the

publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work Metaphors we Live By. In this book,

the authors describe a theory they call Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which assumes

that metaphor is not merely a surface level linguistic phenomenon, but rather a

cognitive function human beings use in order to be able to better conceptualise

abstract notions. Such a metaphor, which exists extra-linguistically in the mind, is

termed a ‘conceptual metaphor’, as opposed to a metaphor in the standard sense,

which is created by a speaker in the moment in order to embellish his speech, but

does not represent underlying conceptual structure. The authors’ representative

example of a conceptual metaphor is LOVE IS A JOURNEY, which is reflected by such

common sayings as “I don’t think this relationship is going anywhere” or “It’s been

a long, bumpy road”.

Thus, according to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphor in Language

mirrors a cognitive phenomenon of “understanding and experiencing one thing in

terms of another” (Lakoff, Johnson 1980, p. 5). This idea that language allows us to

understand the workings of the mind, due to the fact that language uses the same

system as thought, is one of the most central claims of Cognitive Linguistics.

Let us now turn to the use of metaphors in the television debate between Alex

Salmond and Alistair Darling. Both of the two contestants have one major

conceptual metaphor which they employ several times throughout their respective

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speeches. For each of them, I will first analyse this major metaphor and then take a

look at two additional minor metaphors that can be found in the discourse.

One of the most striking aspects of Salmond’s closing speech is his highly frequent

use of the “Scottish hands” metaphor:

(1) Salmond: “we’ll be taking the future of our country into our hands”

(2) Salmond: “the policies and the position of Scotland will be placed in

Scottish hands”

(3) Salmond: “the future of Scotland should be in the hands of the people of

Scotland”

(4) Salmond: “This is our time, our moment. Let’s seize it with both hands.”

The image Salmond is invoking here is one of freedom and self-determination. He

does this by employing the conceptual metaphor MEANS OF ACTION ARE HANDS. Human

beings do much of their everyday manipulation of the physical world by using their

hands. When one holds or grasps an object in one’s hands, one is generally able to

mould, use, or even break it, without the interference of others. It is thus obvious

how this conceptual metaphor came into being.

There are also several minor metaphors in Salmond’s speech. One of them for

example invokes the SECURITY frame:

(5) Salmond: “Few societies anywhere on Earth have secured this oppor-

tunity: to vote themselves into independence.”

The phrase “to secure an opportunity” is so common that it can hardly be recognised

as a metaphor. And yet it must be called a metaphor, since what it does is to use a

term that originally refers to the physical world (“to secure”) to the highly abstract

context ‘opportunity’. SECURITY is a frame in the sense of being a structure of

knowledge that emerges from experience of the world, and which can be indexed

through language. Its invocation deliberately affects the way in which the whole

speech is received by hearers.

The third metaphor that is of interest in Salmond’s speech can be found in (4),

above: “our time, our moment”. Once again, this is a very basic conceptual metaphor:

PERSONAL RELEVANCE IS OWNERSHIP. Salmond is saying that the current time is of vital

importance to his audience, and is underlining this by employing this metaphor.

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Next, let us compare this to the use of metaphor in Alistair Darling’s speech. One

strong conceptual metaphor he employs throughout his speech is that of COUNTRIES

ARE PEOPLE.

(6) Darling: “No country the size of Scotland can compare to what Scotland

has done.”

(7) Darling: “Scotland gave the world the age of enlightenment.”

(8) Darling: “An uncertainty about currency can bring a country to its knees.”

(9) Darling: “[…] backed up by the strength and the security provided by the

United Kingdom.”

This metaphor allows Darling to appeal much more strongly to his audience’s

emotions on a subject as abstract as “countries”. It leads to countries being able to

be respected like humans, as in (6) and (7), and it means countries can suffer like

humans, as shown in (8).

A further and rather unusual metaphor used by Darling is one that is slightly

at odds with the previous one, because it also has to do with countries. In this case,

however, countries are not described as people. Rather, the functioning of a country

is treated as a journey.

(10) Darling: “any country’s starting point is currency, money”

In addition to clashing with Darling’s main COUNTRIES ARE PEOPLE metaphor, the

FUNCTIONING OF A COUNTRY IS A JOURNEY metaphor can also quite reasonably be called a

weak metaphor in and of itself. It is unlikely that many people would consider the

working of a nation to have much in common with a journey. It is therefore

legitimate to question whether this metaphor helped Darling’s case at all. This

metaphor probably also should not be termed a conceptual metaphor.

Finally, one last interesting metaphor used by Darling is one that could

perhaps best be expressed as HUMAN ENDEAVOUR IS A BUILDING.

(11) Darling: “I believe that we will do better […] by building on our strengths

in Scotland as well as being a part of that larger United Kingdom.”

It is hard to say whether this can really be called a conceptual metaphor, since the

phrase “to build on one’s strengths” has become quite strongly lexicalised. However,

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the far more general metaphor of HUMAN ENDEAVOUR IS AN ACT OF CREATION can certainly

be called a conceptual metaphor, as shown by such phrases as “to put the finishing

touches on something”, which could also be used, for example, when talking about

something that is certainly not an actual act of creation, such as the signing of a

contract. This would also cover the instance used in Darling’s speech.

By using this metaphor, Darling also invokes the strength frame, which both

he and his opponent Alex Salmond try to exploit in their speeches. This will be

discussed in greater depth at a later point in this text. Let us instead briefly discuss

why the analysis of metaphor in political discourse is of interest. The metaphors

used in political discourse are important because it is a legitimate assumption that

“metaphor is a cognitive reasoning process rather than simply surface-level

linguistic flare” (Hart 2005, p. 4), which would mean that it is part of the way we

conceptualise various political notions and can thus help us to understand how

certain beliefs within our ideologies come to be and how these can be manipulated

by others, such as politicians.

Action chains and profiling

Action chains are an element central to Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar

model (Langacker 1987, 1991). Action chains, according to Langacker, are a way in

which certain kinds of events are represented in the mind. This idea is based on

observations originally made by Fillmore (1968). Langacker graphically represents

action chains with a model he calls the billiard ball model. To illustrate the idea of

what an action chain is, Taylor (2002, p. 421) uses the following sentence:

(12) John opened the door with the key.

Sentence (12) describes how three different entities relate to one another – John,

the key, and the door. Each of these can be attributed a different semantic role within

the sentence. John is what Langacker calls the ‘agent’ (AG). The agent in an action

chain has certain characteristics. For example, it is the so-called energy source, i.e. it

ultimately causes the described action. It also is animate in most cases. However,

John doesn’t open the door merely by existing. Instead, he does so with the help of a

second entity, represented by the key in this case. This entity is called the

‘instrument’ (INSTR). Finally, a third entity is mentioned in the sentence. This entity

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functions as a so-called energy sink: it absorbs the energy caused by the agent and

in doing so undergoes a change of state. This role, represented by the door in

Taylor’s example, is called the ‘patient’ (PAT). These three semantic roles together

form the action chain shown in billiard ball form in figure 1. Here, each of the three

entities is represented by a ball, each one hitting the next in the order described

above (represented by arrows), thus causing energy to be transmitted, until the last

element finally absorbs the energy (see figure 1).

Crucially, however, these semantic roles can be mapped onto syntactic structure in

several different ways, as the sentences in 13, 14, and 15 illustrate:

(13) John opened the door.

(14) The key opened the door.

(15) The door opened.

By choosing to describe the event in these alternative ways, the speaker construes

the action chain in different ways. It is important to note that the event itself does

not in any way change. It is merely the way it is described that varies. The main

difference between the alternative construals relates to Langacker’s notion of

profiling. In sentence (12), all three semantic roles are profiled. In other words, all

entities are explicitly mentioned in the sentence. However, in sentence (14) for

example, only the instrument and the patient are profiled, while the agent is not. On

the syntactic level, this leads to the instrument taking the place of subject in the

sentence. However we don’t then suddenly interpret the key as the agent in the

sentence. It remains the instrument. Due to our experience of the world, we know

that a key cannot open a door by itself, but needs an animate entity to do so. So the

agent in the action chain still exists in our conception of the event, albeit implicitly.

The same goes for sentence (15), where only the patient is profiled, yet all three

entities are conceptualised.

Figure 1: the Billiard Ball Model

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So if one and the same event can be construed in many different ways, then the

choice of which construal to use is purely a matter of the speaker’s preference. Thus,

the choice the speaker makes says a considerable amount about his or her intentions

in making the utterance. This is why action chains also represent a very useful aspect

of discourse analysis, particularly in political discourse, where it is often the

speaker’s intention to manipulate the audience through his or her utterances.

Before we start to examine the action chains and other sentence structures in

the Salmond vs. Darling debate, one more piece of terminology needs to be

introduced, once again from Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. This is the notion of

profiling, which has to do with the so-called ‘trajector’ (TR) and ‘landmark’ (LM).

Any element in a sentence that is profiled, as in the examples above, so basically

every spoken element of a sentence, is called a ‘profile’. Langacker distinguishes

between ‘nominal profiles’ (entities, i.e. nouns) and ‘relational profiles’ (links

between entities, i.e. most other traditional word classes). Of the entities linked by

a relational profile, one is always the trajector and thus has greater prominence and

is the main focus of attention. All other entities linked by the relational profile are

termed landmarks, which have a much more passive nature and only have

secondary attentional focus. For example, in sentence (12) ‘John’ is the trajector and

‘the door’ and ‘the key’ are landmarks, while in sentence (14) ‘the key’ is the trajector

and ‘the door’ is the landmark. This terminology will also be necessary when

analysing the subject material.

So what can be said about Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling’s treatment of

action chains and sentence structure in their speeches on Scottish independence?

Let us examine some examples.

(16) Salmond: “So when we post that ballot in the next few days or we go to

the polling station, we’ll be taking the future of our country into our

hands.”

A part of this sentence has already been mentioned in the metaphor section above.

Let us now, however, take a look at the structure of the sentence as a whole. In fact,

we find that the sentence is made up of three clauses, one main clause and two

temporal sub-clauses. All three of these have the same basic structure. There is an

agent in all three, which is actually identical in all of them: ‘we’. These agents are all

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the trajectors of their respective verbs (i.e. they are in subject position) and all of

them have a landmark. In two of the cases, the landmark is a patient (‘ballot’ and

‘future of our country’), while in the other it is a location (‘polling station’). All of

them, however, have a very basic TR LM organisation, even though the agents are

arguably not particularly contentful and not particularly necessary. Salmond’s

reason for using this particular construal is quite obvious, however. By setting up

action chains of this type, and further emphasising them by tripling them, an ACTION

frame is invoked, which leads to a feeling of activity and vigour. This is the feeling

that Salmond wishes to evoke in his audience.

The opposite structure, in a sense, can be found in the following sentence:

(17) “The choices that the people of Scotland make will be reflected in policy,

and that means that the policies and the position of Scotland will be

placed in Scottish hands.”

Here, we have an example of two consecutive passive constructions. What happens

in a passive construction is that the landmark of a sentence becomes the trajector,

while the original trajector disappears entirely from the sentence, unless it is

reintroduced using a “by” construction. So, to take the above sentence as an example,

instead of saying “X will place the policies in Scottish hands”, Salmond chooses not

to profile the agent and instead leave it implicit. It does not disappear conceptually.

It is still assumed to exist, both by the speaker and the hearer.

This process has an important conceptual effect. One could say it takes the

action out of the action chain. Since the agent is no longer of importance, the action

becomes such that one no longer has influence on it. It becomes a mere fact, and the

sentence thus seems almost to describe a state rather than a dynamic event. One

important aspect of states as opposed to events is stability and certainty. It is

something that one can rely on and trust. Thus, Salmond succeeds in making a highly

hypothetical event such as the consequences of Scottish independence appear to be

certain and trustworthy.

The same passive construction can also be found in the next example, though

here the effect is slightly different:

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(18) “This is an opportunity peacefully at the ballot box, in a process which

has been agreed and consented.”

This is a sentence that is not particularly clearly formed, and whose grammaticality

might be questioned. An analysis based on grammatical aspects would thus usually

be hard to justify. But that part of the sentence which shall be analysed here, namely

the locative sub-clause that contains the passive construction, is perfectly gram-

matical and consequently the following analysis is justifiable.

In this case, as in the last, the passive construction leads to a focus on the

patient of the action chain, with the agent not being profiled at all. However it is

unlikely that Salmond’s sole motive for this is the stativisation of a process, as was

the case in sentence (17), although that may also play a minor role. The motive I

consider far more likely here is that Salmond does not wish to profile the agent, since

the agent of this particular sentence is the British government, an institution he is

trying to gain independence from and which is backing his opponent in the debate.

This means he does not wish to mention the government in a positive light in his

speech.

Finally, let us very briefly examine one more interesting example from

Salmond’s speech:

(19) “Few societies anywhere on Earth have secured this opportunity: to vote

themselves into independence.”

Here, agent and patient are the same entity, so the action chain is in fact an ‘action

circle’. This entity which is simultaneously two different semantic roles is the

trajector, which metaphorically moves into the landmark ‘independence’. In this

sentence, the grammatical structure mirrors the semantic content, a phenomenon

known as iconicity. Iconic constructions like this are often considered to be

particularly aesthetically pleasing, and hearers are thus more likely to regard the

speaker in a positive light. That is presumably the reason why Salmond chose to

employ it.

Alistair Darling hardly has any action chains in his speech, at least none of the

traditional type. He also treats action chains far less innovatively than Alex Salmond.

Most likely this is due to Darling’s personality. He is not as used to employing speech

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as a tool of manipulation as Salmond is. Mostly, they are restricted to the standard

form, as in the following example:

(20) “We do not need to divide these islands into separate states in order to

assert our Scottish identity.”

Here there is an agent ‘we’ that is the trajector of the verb ‘divide’ whose landmark

is the patient ‘these islands’. The only alteration vis-à-vis the prototypical action

chain is that the instrument is not profiled. However, this is very often the case, since

the identity of the instrument is not usually of importance. In this case the reason

for not profiling the instrument is obvious: the instrument is the referendum being

debated, so any hearer already knows exactly what instrument Darling is talking

about without him explicitly mentioning it.

There is also one instance of a passive construction:

(21) “We can have the best worlds with more decisions being taken here in

Scotland […]”

Since the agent is not profiled, the patient, which would usually be the landmark of

the verb ‘take’, becomes the trajector, while the location ‘here in Scotland’ becomes

the sole landmark. Once again, however, this is not an innovative device. While one

might argue that the agent in this context is the Scottish government, the current

head of which Darling is currently arguing against, this does seem rather far-fetched.

It is far more likely that the agent here is simply not important, since Darling is not

speaking of any particular decisions, but rather any decisions that might be made in

a further devolved Scotland, irrespective of who makes them.

Force Dynamics

The important Cognitive linguist Leonard Talmy (2000) argues that human beings’

naïve view of how physical objects interact with each other differs strongly from the

reality of Newtonian physics. According to Talmy, humans have a schematic system

in their minds which contains a model of physical interaction. He calls this system

the ‘Force Dynamics System’.

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Before we use Talmy’s force dynamics model to analyse the Scottish independence

debate, we should first briefly describe the model. Talmy says that in humans’ view,

when two physical objects interact, due to our need to give attentional precedence

to a single entity (a principle known as figure-ground alignment), we give one of the

entities focal attention. Talmy calls this entity the ‘agonist’. The other entity is seen

as the ‘antagonist’, whose purpose it is to oppose the agonist by changing its state in

some way. It can either succeed or fail to achieve this. The agonist can either be

tending towards action or towards rest. Consequently, the antagonist’s tendency is

the opposite. Talmy (2000) gives several example sentences:

(22) The ball kept rolling because of the wind blowing on it.

(23) The log kept lying on the incline because of the ridge there.

In the first example, the ball is the agonist, which has a natural tendency toward rest.

This rest however is overcome by the antagonist’s own tendency towards action,

represented by the wind. Thus the overall tendency is toward action. In the second

example, on the other hand, the agonist’s natural tendency would be toward motion,

since it, the log, is on an incline. However the agonist, in this case the ridge, is once

again the stronger of the two and thus imposes its own tendency toward rest upon

the overall situation. Two further situations would also be conceivable: in both of

the described scenarios it could equally well be the agonist that is successful. This

leads to four basic force-dynamic patterns. While Talmy goes on to describe further,

more complex patterns, these four will suffice for the purposes of this essay.

In the debate between Salmond and Darling, both opponents use the force

dynamics model to illustrate their speeches by applying it metaphorically to

abstract entities rather than physical objects. Let us compare the following two

sentences, the first by Salmond, and the second by Darling:

(24) Salmond: “We’ll have challenges as an independent country, and we’ve

got to rise to these challenges to solve them.”

(25) Darling: “An uncertainty about currency can bring a country to its knees.”

Both of them, in essence, are describing the same scenario. Both are talking about

what would happen should Scotland choose to become independent. And both speak

of obstacles being faced by independent Scotland, though while Darling names the

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issue of currency as a concrete obstacle, Salmond speaks only of obstacles in general.

Applying the force dynamics model to this scenario, the agonist is in this case

independent Scotland, which has a tendency towards action or, in other words,

functioning. The antagonist is represented by the obstacles that might prevent

Scotland from functioning and whose tendency is thus towards rest.

The two disputants differ, however, in their prediction of the outcome of the

conflict between agonist and antagonist. While Salmond seems optimistic that the

agonist would prevail and an overall state of action would remain, Darling paints a

darker picture by suggesting that the agonist may fail to overcome the antagonist.

Salmond also makes the additional step of introducing a ‘we’ and equating it with

the agonist. By then assigning success to the agonist he is once again giving the

impression of empowering his audience.

The force dynamics model is therefore a useful tool to analyse such situations

since it makes similarities and contrasts between various utterances in the area of

physical interaction particularly clear. As Hart (2011, p. 283) says “As with

transitivity, the force-dynamic system has the facility to analyse the same situation

from one perspective or another and so is inherently ideological.”

Summary

It has hopefully become clear that Cognitive Linguistic methods can be highly useful

in discourse analysis. We have now examined the television debate on Scottish

independence, between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, in regard to three

different criteria, all of them derived from Cognitive Linguistics. We started by

looking at the use of conceptual metaphors and what they tell us about the speakers’

intentions and ideology. While Salmond emphasises security, personal relevance,

and above all, action, thus focusing mainly on his audience and their emotions,

Alistair Darling chooses instead to focus primarily on the abstract notion of Scotland

itself, concretising and to some extent idealising it by portraying it as a person. He

also emphasises strength, while making sure to qualify this aspect by associating it

closely with the united country of Great Britain.

Next, we looked at action chains, and the related construal operations of

emphasis and profiling. These too are employed in order to transmit certain mani-

pulative concepts to the audience. Once again, Salmond strongly emphasises action

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combined with safety and trustworthiness. He also can be observed to omit positive

reference to his political opponents and to make aesthetic use iconicity in his

syntactic constructions. Darling on the other hand opts for encoding the few action

chains he uses in the traditional manner of ‘agent = trajector’ and ‘patient = land-

mark’, which leads to a clear, matter-of-fact style of speech.

Finally, we applied the force dynamics model to discourse analysis, which

enabled us to find and make clear the main underlying difference of message

between Salmond and Darling: While Salmond tries to make his audience believe

that an independent Scotland can overcome any future obstacles, Darling warns the

listeners of the threat of failure caused by these obstacles.

So overall, Alex Salmond strongly addresses the Scottish audience and their

emotions, while using pleasing language and painting a positive picture of the future.

Alistair Darling meanwhile uses more abstract concepts, speaks in a prosaic fashion,

and speaks pessimistically of an independent future. It is clear which approach had

the better effect on the public: Afterwards, an overwhelming majority of 71% of

viewers said that Alex Salmond won the debate.

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Publication Bibliography

Dirven, René; Polzenhagen, Frank; Wolf, Hans-Georg (2007): Cognitive Linguistics,

Ideology, and Critical Discourse Analysis. In Dirk Geeraerts, Hubert Cuyckens (Eds.):

The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford, New York: Oxford University

Press, pp. 1222–1240.

Fillmore, Charles J. (1968): The Case for Case. In E. Bach, R. T. Harms (Eds.):

Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 1–88.

Hart, Christopher (2005): Analysing Political Discourse. Toward a Cognitive

Approach. In Critical Discourse Studies 2 (2), pp. 189–194.

Hart, Christopher (2011): Force-Interactive Patterns in Immigration Discourse. A

Cognitive Linguistic Approach to CDA. In Discourse & Society 22 (3), pp. 269–286.

Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark (1980): Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. (1987): Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. I: Theoretical

Prerequisites. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. (1991): Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. II: Descriptive

Application. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

Talmy, Leonard (2000): Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. I: Concept Structuring

Systems. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press.

Taylor, John R. (2002): Cognitive grammar. Oxford, New York: Oxford University

Press (Oxford textbooks in linguistics).

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Appendix 1: Alex Salmond’s speech

The decision that we make in three weeks’ time will define us – this generation and

also the future of the nation. Few societies anywhere on Earth have secured this

opportunity: to vote themselves into independence. This is an opportunity

peacefully at the ballot box, in a process which has been agreed and consented. It’s

an opportunity which may not come our way again. So when we post that ballot in

the next few days or we go to the polling station, we’ll be taking the future of our

country into our hands. We’ll have opportunities as an independent country and a

means of taking advantage of them. We’ll have challenges as an independent

country, and we’ve got to rise to these challenges to solve them. In contrast, all of

the No-campaign has nothing, absolutely nothing positive to say about the future of

this country. In reality, there is only one thing we can guarantee, and this is what a

Yes vote can guarantee: At each and every election in an independent Scotland we

will get the government that we vote for. The choices that the people of Scotland

make will be reflected in policy, and that means that the policies and the position of

Scotland will be placed in Scottish hands. And this referendum is not about me, or

Alistair, or political parties, or the newspapers, or anybody. This referendum is

about the future of Scotland. And the future of Scotland should be in the hands of the

people of Scotland. It’s about believing that we can govern ourselves better than

anyone else can. We don’t need to rise and be a nation again, we only have to vote to

believe in ourselves. This is our time, our moment. Let’s seize it with both hands.

Appendix 2: Alistair Darling’s speech

No country the size of Scotland can compare to what Scotland has done: our

successes of invention, of engineering, of medicine; Scotland gave the world the age

of enlightenment. Now of course we can go it alone. But I don’t believe we’d be as

successful as Scotland will be as part of the United Kingdom. I believe that we will

do better, we will prosper together, by building on our strengths in Scotland as well

as being a part of that larger United Kingdom. Yes, I raised the issue of currency

again tonight, because any country’s starting point is currency, money, just as every

household depends upon money. An uncertainty about currency can bring a country

to its knees. Now I know there are some who are thinking about giving

independence a chance. But when we can’t be told about the currency, I don’t think

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that can be trusted. And frankly, scary stories about the National Health Service I

think are beneath contempt. We have now had three and a half hours of prime

television time where the two of us have debated, and I still haven’t heard straight

answers to a simple question. Alex Salmond says you and I don’t need to know what

the plan B is. Well yes we do. We do not need to divide these islands into separate

states in order to assert our Scottish identity. We can have the best worlds with more

decisions being taken here in Scotland, backed up by the strength and the security

provided by the United Kingdom. I say that we all have no option other than to say,

politely, respectfully, but firmly: No thanks to independence.