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While CDA is largely an interpretative exercise, it places an emphasis on 'triangulation' as a guiding methodological principle intended to help ground analyses and guard against purely subjective readings of texts. Missing from CDA, however, is triangulation incorporating experimental methodologies. In this paper, I argue that CDA in general can benefit from an experimental dimension and that Cognitive Linguistic approaches in particular lend themselves to extension into experimentalism. I demonstrate this by reporting a recent experiment carried out within a Cognitive Linguistic framework on the effects of regular transactive versus reciprocal verbs in news reports of political protests. Results of the experiment show that in the context of media discourse on political protests the presentation of these alternate constructions, as well as differences in information sequence, affect how people apportion blame and the level of aggression they perceive in social actors. The experiment thus not only provides evidence for the ideological effects of these particular linguistic differences but more generally goes some way to justifying CDA's focus on micro-level lexico-grammatical features of texts.

In this chapter, I introduce one cognitive school of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) in the form of Cognitive Linguistic approaches. Cognitive Linguistic CDS (CL-CDS) is characterised by an emphasis on the conceptual dimensions of semiosis. Specifically, it addresses the conceptualisations invoked by language and the ideological or legitimating potentials that those conceptualisations might realise in political contexts of communication. I begin the chapter by providing an overview of the different frameworks in CL-CDS before focussing specifically on image schema analysis, illustrated with examples from discourse on political protests. I then go on to make a connection between Cognitive Linguistic and multimodal approaches to CDS. The claim made is that understanding language involves fully modal rather than amodal mental representations. I therefore argue that existing research on the social semiotics of multimodal representation is an important source in considering the meanings of language in use. I illustrate this claim relating linguistic instances of discourse on political protests to visual instances.