A Cognitive Linguistic Study of The Use Of Creative Figurative Language in American Political Discourse

This book decodes commercial news discourses from the perspective of cognitive semantics. It attaches considerable importance to the bodily experientialism and linguistic embodiment advocated in discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics and explores the complex yet thought-provoking correlation between overt language and covert cognition by focusing on contrastive analyses of metaphors, image schemas, and stance markers in texts. On the basis of the analyses, the author discusses the linguistic applications, lexical devices and personal experiences, along with their embodied mechanisms, revealing the linguistic strategies, embodied cognitive linguistic actions and constructive thoughts used in media discourses on product promotion, human resources deployment, and commodity problem resolution. In turn, this sheds light on how linguistic selections and cognitive mechanisms are used in composing media news and on how public cognition on certain social and business issues might be framed. The combination of cognitive semantics and commercial discourse analysis offers comprehensive and rewarding insights into the cross-cultural research of both cognitive actions and linguistic behavior reflected in news reports and highlights the correlation between the use of wording and cognitive construction in discourses, which broadens the scope of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Further, the use of analytical measures and the effective integration of discourse analysis and cognitive semantics lend the book additional analytical authenticity, providing an empirical foundation for cross-cultural communication studies.

Although recent linguistic and media-studies' research has increasingly dealt with forms of imagery beyond language, such as in audiovisual formats, only little attention has been paid to the specific media character of audiovisual images. This raises a theoretical as well as methodological problem: How can processes of figurative meaning making in audiovisual media be adequately conceptualized and described? The book intends to bridge this research gap with an analysis of campaign commercials, a hitherto largely underexplored object of study in metaphor and metonymy research. To achieve this goal, a transdisciplinary film-analytical and cognitive-linguistic account of audiovisual figurativity is developed and examined through a comparative analysis of figurative meaning-making processes in German and Polish campaign commercials from 2009 and 2011. By setting the inseparable intertwining of language and cinematic staging, sensing and understanding center stage, the book provides insight into the dynamic nature and embodied affective grounds of audiovisual figurativity, and challenges the long-known dichotomies of rational discourse and affective manipulation, political message and media effect.

Dieser Band präsentiert die Beiträge der VI. Innsbrucker Ringvorlesung zur Translationswissenschaft, die im Sommersemester 2008 am Institut für Translationswissenschaft stattfand. Das zehnte Jahr der Internationalen Innsbrucker Ringvorlesungen war Anlass, Stand und Perspektiven der Translationswissenschaft selbst auf den Prüfstand zu stellen. International namhafte Translationswissenschaftler aus fünf europäischen Ländern melden sich in ihren Beiträgen zum allgemeinen Forschungsstand der Translationswissenschaft und zu verschiedenen Teildisziplinen zu Wort. A. Pym (Spanien) und L.N. Zybatow (Österreich) prüfen die theoretischen Ausgangspostulate der widerstreitenden Ansätze der Translationswissenschaft. S. Halverson (Norwegen) entwirft eine Kognitive Translationstheorie, M. Russo, C. Bendazzoli und A. Sandrelli (Italien) plädieren für eine empirisch basierte Dolmetschwissenschaft. D. Chiaro (Italien) und J. Diaz-Cintas (Großbritannien) beleuchten die Filmübersetzung neu. G. Budin und P. Sandrini (Österreich) fokussieren Forschungsstand und Perspektiven des Fachübersetzens und W. Pöckl und A. Petrova (Österreich) argumentieren schließlich für eine selbständige Theorie des literarischen Übersetzens. Dieses Buch enthält sieben englische und drei deutsche Beiträge.

The present volume explores the meeting ground between Critical Discourse Studies and Cultural Linguistics. The contributions investigate culture-specific conceptualisations, ways of framing and conceptual metaphors in political discourse, as well as cultural models, cultural stereotypes and stereotyping. The individual authors use quantitative (e.g. corpus-based approaches) and/or qualitative methods. They address a range of contexts, e.g. Europe, the US, Japan, West Africa, and a variety of topics, e.g. migration, presidential elections, identity, food culture, concepts of health. The papers included in this volume show that ideologies, the key concern of Critical Discourse Studies, cannot be analysed independently of cultural conceptualisations. In a complementary, dialectic fashion, cultural conceptualisation, the central concern of Cultural Linguistics, have ideological implications, sometimes subtle, sometimes very straightforward. The present volume thus illustrates that travelling on this meeting ground is a natural and fruitful endeavour for both approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics draws on the rich theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and focuses on the social factors that underlie the variability of meaning and conceptualization. In the last decade, the field has expanded in various way. The current volume takes stock of current and emerging advances in the field in short academic contributions. The studies collected in this book have a usage-based approach to language variation and change, drawing on the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and are sensitive to social variation, be it cross-linguistic or language-internal. Three types of contributions are collected in this book. First, it contains theoretical overview papers on the domains that have witnessed expansion in recent years. Second, it presents novel research ideas in proof-of-concept contributions, aimed at blue-sky research and out-of-the-box linguistic analyses. Third, it showcases recent empirical studies within the field. By combining these three types of contributions, the book provides an encompassing overview of novel developments in the field of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.