Form-function dialectics in the analysis of irony in political discourse

In this paper, I analyze the construction of the trope of irony in a political interview, more specifically the interview with a Spanish politician on television in 2013. Its context is the emergence of the 15M, a citizen’s protest movement against the cuts imposed by the European Union and the Spanish Government. From a theoretical-methodological point of view, I adopt a holistic perspective, inspired by Halliday’s approach of jointly analysing the form-function relationship and White’s constructivism. I also review the different definitions and explanations of irony. After analysing the formal resources that construct irony, I give an account of the cognitive frameworks that are opposed in this discourse, and finally describe their narrative disposition and the communicative functions that those resources fulfill.

Experiencing multimodal rhetoric and argumentation in political advertisements: a study of how people respond to the rhetoric of multimodal communication

Research into visual and multimodal rhetoric has been dominated by social scientific and textual perspectives that may not be able to provide documented understandings of how rhetorical objects are actually experienced by an audience. In this study, the authors engage in rhetorical protocol analysis through 10 in-depth interviews asking informants to make sense of selected political advertisements in the 2020 US election campaign. They examine the types of competing sensory elements found within the campaign texts and situations, which they term ‘multimodal incongruity’ and establish two types of cognitive frameworks informants use when engaging in the political rhetoric of the commercials: personal experience and cynicism. Personal experience allowed the informants to make sense of and argue against campaign messages. Cynicism often guided participants to unpack the generic conventions of political advertising, politics more generally, and opposing partisan strategies. Both interpretive frames – but the frame of cynicism, in particular – enable participants to critically distance their reading of and emotional response to the campaign commercials. This critical distancing reveals connections between rationality and emotionality through ‘deliberative embedding’, meaning that the emotional is understood in terms of and negotiated in relation to already established cognitive frameworks of information, opinions and cynical readings of the genre. The authors conclude the essay by reflecting on their methodological and theoretical insights regarding multimodal rhetoric.

Cognitive frameworks of different types of Social entrepreneurs

<p> </p> <p>The main purpose of the paper is to elaborate the cognitive frameworks using which social entrepreneurs (i.e., social bricoleurs, social constructionists and social engineers) identify meaningful patterns leading to their identification of divergent opportunities. Individuals develop cognitive frameworks (prototypes) via experiences which enable them to recognize patterns leading to opportunity recognition. This study will propose how different types of social entrepreneurs use their distinctive cognitive frameworks to identify and recognize patterns relevant to their respective goals. Future directions for research and practical implications for entrepreneurs are provided. </p>

Cognitive frameworks of different types of Social entrepreneurs

<p> </p> <p>The main purpose of the paper is to elaborate the cognitive frameworks using which social entrepreneurs (i.e., social bricoleurs, social constructionists and social engineers) identify meaningful patterns leading to their identification of divergent opportunities. Individuals develop cognitive frameworks (prototypes) via experiences which enable them to recognize patterns leading to opportunity recognition. This study will propose how different types of social entrepreneurs use their distinctive cognitive frameworks to identify and recognize patterns relevant to their respective goals. Future directions for research and practical implications for entrepreneurs are provided. </p>

About as boring as flossing sharks: Cognitive accounts of irony and the family of approximate comparison constructions in American English

This paper reports a case study on a family of American English constructions that will be called the family of approximate comparison constructions. This family has three members, all of which follow the syntactic pattern about as X as Y with X being an adjective, but which allow three related functions: literal comparison, simile and irony. Two cognitive frameworks concern themselves with irony, the cognitive modelling approach and viewpoint approach, and the paper will show that, while the ironic approximate comparison construction calls central assumptions of the cognitive modelling approach to question, the viewpoint account can be refined to handle these cases. In doing so, it furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of irony. The paper provides a corpus-based analysis on the Y slot as well as collostructional analyses on the adjectival X slot in the family of approximate comparison constructions. The results thereof suggest that the ironic approximate comparison construction, in comparison to its literal counterpart, prefers adjectives that convey positively connotated, nuanced attitudes and is formally less variable in the Y slot. The preference for particular adjectives lends further support to the assumption that hearers understand the construction as ironic or literal before speakers complete their utterance. Given that, it is argued that the ironic approximate comparison construction communicates an inherent viewpoint.

Intuitive Biology Thinking: Comparing Chinese and US Middle Schoolers

Previous literature demonstrated that people spontaneously engage in systematic ways of thinking about biology. However, with most studies focusing on the western population, little is known about the universal nature of these cognitive frameworks. The current study used a construal-based survey to systematically test intuitive biology thinking in China. Overall, Chinese 8th graders demonstrated stronger essentialist thinking, weaker anthropocentric thinking, and similar level of teleological thinking compared to the US counterparts.

Travel journals in Islam and their contribution to the development of social thought

Travel journals are primarily a literary genre in which the writer expresses his impressions about the geographical and other characteristics of the region through which he travels, along with demographic, cultural, religious, cognitive and ethical characteristics of the people he encounters during his travels. This literary genre has an extraordinary potential to reveal the cognitive frameworks of the collective thought of a nation that is directly or indirectly manifested through various folk customs and traditions. Travel journals are beneficial in two ways when it comes to social thought. First, an author who visits new regions and meets a people that he has not had the opportunity to talk to before, informs his readers about the customs, beliefs, fears and hopes of that people. Demographic descriptions and analyses of all interesting, and sometimes strange, events that he witnessed, are a testimony to his modern readers about the existence of different views of the world, not so far away from them. Moreover, it will provide later readers with authentic information about how people once thought and how a community functioned. Secondly, an author who writes about his impressions after encountering a new tradition inadvertently makes his own judgment about it. In that way, he implicitly and indirectly points to the collective consciousness that he brings through his subjective judgments from the region which he belongs to, from his homeland. This aspect is most noticeable with later readers, because they can observe from a certain distance both the people to whom the author belongs to and the people about whom the author reports. If the author is affected by a certain phenomenon, it means that the collective consciousness of his people would not approve of such an action, and if he supported a tradition, it meant that his people would also agree with it. In this paper, we will try to offer a brief insight into the history of travel journals in Islam, and to present sociological potentials of some of the main travel journals prepared by Muslim authors during their arduous and difficult journeys.

The Purpose and Nature of Life

This chapter considers how religious parents in the United States approach the job of passing on their family's faith and practices to their children. Furthermore, the chapter takes a look at what assumptions, categories, and beliefs inform their views on the question, as well as which desires, feelings, and concerns influence the ways they undertake the transmission of their religion to their kids. This chapter addresses these issues by systematically analyzing the cultural models that most U.S. parents hold about the issue. It identifies the relevant cultural models that parents hold, which significantly influence their behaviors. In short, the chapter focuses on cognitive frameworks that shape practices rather than the practices themselves.