The thesis is concerned with texts that mystify events being reported. It begins by focusing
on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a currently prominent enterprise, one of whose
concerns is with the isolation of text which mystifies the nature of events described. When
CDA isolates mystifying text, it is usually with the perspective of a non-analytical reader,
either explicitly or implicitly in mind. However, the notion of a non-analytical reader in
CDA is undeveloped from a cognitive point of view. The general structure of the thesis is
as follows. In the first section, I show how CDA's approach to highlighting textual
mystification is inadvertently bound up with symbolic notions of mental representation in
cognitive science. In the second section, I outline theories of mental representation in
connectionism and cognitive linguistics which problematise the symbolic assumptions of
CDA and thus what CDA locates as mystifying text. The thesis develops cumulatively
towards an alternative framework for highlighting mystification, in the third section, which
includes compatible elements from connectionism, cognitive linguistics and recent
psycholinguistic research on inference generation. My framework predicts how certain text
can lead to mystification for a non-analytical reader who has little vested interest in a text
and is largely unfamiliar with its subject matter. I show how mystification for this nonanalytical
reader is connected with inference generation but, in contrast to CDA, I provide
a detailed processing profile for such a reader. Attitudes in CDA towards inference
generation are often inconsistent and are in conflict with recent psycholinguistic research.
My framework, rooted in empirical psycholinguistic study, enables a more plausible,
comprehensive and thus consistent perspective on inference generation in reading and how
this relates to mystification. Finally, my framework also highlights CDA's 'overinterpretation'
in text exegesis done by proxy for non-analytical readers
