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'Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political' -- the topic of this special issue -- could be taken in at least two different ways. On the one hand, it suggests a focus on language-in-use in political settings, an attention to rhetorics that traces back to Aristotle. On the other hand, it refers to language-focused methods of analysis, which might include attention to rhetorical devices but need not be limited to that. The articles included here do both: 'taking language seriously' (White 1992) in terms of its role in political acts and interactions, they also evince different ways in which language can be analysed, focusing in particular on the tropes of metaphor and metonymy and the issue of classification or categorisation. This concern with language goes against its apprehension as being separate, and separable, from the world it (re-)presents. In the older, traditional view, language is understood as referring, transparently, to that which it designates. By contrast, in the view articulated here, reflecting both cognitive linguistic and interpretive/constructivist approaches, language is seen as integrally constituting the world it presents, expressing its users' experiences of that world (at least in part). The former position assumes that a god's eye view of the world (what Haraway (1988) called 'the god trick') is possible, that the language we use to talk about the world is apart from it. The latter position -- ours, and that reflected in the articles in this special issue -- holds that any description or characterisation of something in the world is tied to a perspective on it. In this view, and especially given the subject matter of these articles, that perspective is less a matter of individual subjectivity than it is of collective, inter-subjective meaning-making. These arguments also hold for language designating elements of the natural and physical world: why did consensus form, for instance, around the word 'tree' among English speakers, or 'fa ' with Hungarian speakers, or 'eitz ' for Hebrew speakers, in reference to the tall, leafy plant? In this special issue, and in our further comments on the topic, article authors and we engage the collective, social aspects of the political and policy worlds that comprise the focus of the research presented here.
A concern with language...