Ideology is so powerful it makes us believe that war is rational, despite both its brutal means and its devastating ends. The power of ideology comes from its intimate relation to language: ideology recruits all semiotic modalities, but language is its engine-room. Drawing on Halliday's linguistic theory - in particular, his account of the "semiotic big-bang" - this book explains the latent semiotic machinery of language on which ideology depends. The book illustrates the ideological power of language through a study of perhaps the most significant and consequential of our ideologies: those that enable us to legitimate, celebrate, even venerate war, at the same time that we abhor, denounce and proscribe violence. To do so, it makes use of large multi-register corpora (including the British National Corpus), and the reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Australian, US, European, and Asian news sources. Combining detailed text analysis with corpus linguistic methods, it provides an empirical analysis showing the astonishing reach of our ideologies of war and their profoundly covert and coercive power.

Ideology is so powerful it makes us believe that war is rational, despite both its brutal means and its devastating ends. The power of ideology comes from its intimate relation to language: ideology recruits all semiotic modalities, but language is its engine-room. Drawing on Halliday's linguistic theory - in particular, his account of the "semiotic big-bang" - this book explains the latent semiotic machinery of language on which ideology depends. The book illustrates the ideological power of language through a study of perhaps the most significant and consequential of our ideologies: those that enable us to legitimate, celebrate, even venerate war, at the same time that we abhor, denounce and proscribe violence. To do so, it makes use of large multi-register corpora (including the British National Corpus), and the reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Australian, US, European, and Asian news sources. Combining detailed text analysis with corpus linguistic methods, it provides an empirical analysis showing the astonishing reach of our ideologies of war and their profoundly covert and coercive power.

This book presents a unique range of interdisciplinary work on questions of language development and evolution. It makes visible the significant contribution which meaning-oriented linguistics is making to debates about the origins of language - from the perspective of language evolution in the species (viewed as the evolution of "meaning potential") to language development in the child (viewed as "learning how to mean"). As well as linguistics in the systemic functional, or Hallidayan, tradition, the book offers contributions from primatology, psychiatry, sociology and education. What the authors share is a view of language as a social semiotic system. By seeing language in this way, and drawing on actual language corpora, the authors are able to address major questions of deep social significance, including: the role of grammar in the emergence of consciousness, from protolanguage to higher order consciousness the dynamics of language variation, including semantic variation, in children's development children's learning in and about a second language the significance of different ways of talking about language for school literacy development understanding borderline personality disorder from the perspective of language development.