1 Discourse, argumentation and constructivist approaches: analysing discourses of social change 1 ESPERANZA MORALES-LÓPEZ Department of Galician-Portuguese, French and Linguistics University of A Coruña Spain e.morales.lopez@udc.es Paper presented at the ISSA14 Conference (Amsterdam, July 2014) Abstract My research in recent years has focused on the analysis of discourse of social change as a type of ‘ideological construction’, using a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that combines: a) constructivist rhetoric and argumentation; b) the constructivist theories of Bateson, Goffman, Gumperz and Lakoff; and c) embodied social cognition studies. This article examines the concept of ideological construction in relation to data from the Spanish 15M movement. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, discourses of social change, constructivist rhetoric, complexity studies, embodied cognition, socio-cognitive frame, ideological construction, 15M. 1. ITRODUCTIO In recent decades, research in Critical Discourse Analysis (or CDA), particularly in Europe, has shown a growing interest in political discourse in globalized, democratic societies. This, in turn, has led to a broader definition of the term ‘political discourse’, used here in the wider sense of the varied discursive practices of political professionals, and the socio-political proposals for change generated by diverse social groups, described as ‘discourses of social change’ by Montesano Montessori & Morales-López (2014) and Morales-López (2012, 2014). Discourses of social change are ideological speech acts that call for radical social and political reforms. They appeal, in the first instance, to the country’s citizens, in order to gain support for the speakers’ ideological position, but also to government, key state bodies and other international institutions, in an effort to have their proposals adopted as policy (Morales-López, 2012, 2014). 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AD METHODOLOGY This study looks at discourses of social change from three different perspectives: 1) pragmatic-functionalist; 2) rhetorical-argumentative; and 3) socio-cognitive. This triple- 1 This research is part of the ‘Constructivist Rhetoric: Identity Discourses’ project, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition (FFI2013-40934R; period: 2014-2016; http://cei.udc.es ; www.academia.edu ).