Cognitive pragmatics of American presidential debates: a case for economic metaphors

This article focuses on cognitive-pragmatic properties of conceptual metaphors of ECONOMY in the 21st century American presidential campaigns. In this paper, we aim to elaborate the models of metaphoric conceptualization of ECONOMY, state their functions in terms of discourse strategies, and describe their impact on the opponents and the audience. This research is underpinned by conceptual metaphor theories and ideas of cognitive pragmatics, which postulates the unity of cognitive and communicative aspects of discourse. The benefits of this integrative cognitive-pragmatic approach are in the fact that it can consequently explicate the meaning of speaker’s message and the expected impact of their discourse on the audience. For this aim, we stress the persuasive and manipulative nature of American presidential debates as a mass-media mediated genre of political discourse. Adopting a cognitive-pragmatic perspective on presidential debates, we claim that conceptual metaphors of economy constitute time and ideology specific conceptual models; their dominant functions are persuasive, informative, and manipulative. In the discourse of the 21st century presidential debates, we distinguish seven leading models of conceptual metaphors of economy, common for both republican and democratic candidates. The choice of discourse strategies of debate participants depends upon the candidates’ intentions while their impact on the opponent and the audience is influenced by meta-communicative issues of candidates’ communicative behavior and (im)politeness strategies in particular. The 21st century presidential debates are characterized by the abundance of discourse strategies of aggression and impoliteness.

From stance to identity: Stancetaking in contemporary English risk discourse

The study focuses on stancetaking – an intersubjective and context-bound discursive activity that unites micro- and micro-properties of discursive interaction. The purpose of this work consists in discovering discursive ways of situational identities construction in contemporary English risk discourse as a result of stancetaking on risk. The theoretical background for this research comprises post-structuralist and socio-constructionist approaches to discourse analysis, establishing a new, socio-cognitive, direction in discourse studies. Contemporary English risk discourse serves a situational environment for investigating stancetaking in this work. It is approached as a discursive phenomenon of two types – a risk discourse proper (communicative situation of risk) and a discourse about risk (metacommunicative situation of risk). Discursive framework of communicative situation of risk reveals cognitive, pragmatic, and interactional dynamics of stancetaking in the conditions of in situ discussion of eventual stances (decisions) on risks. The inquiry resulted in determining the stance-takers’ situational identities, ranging from risk-averse to risk-taking subjects. Investigation of conversational patterns and discursive dynamism of stance alignment enabled identification and characterization of interactional mechanisms of stancetaking in situations of risk. Explorations of stancetaking in ex situ discursive conditions of metacommunicative situations of risk shed light onto socio-semiotic potential and pragmatic-rhetorical patterns of stancetaking. Complex analysis of the stance-takers’ language output provided a basis for establishing a typology of their situational identities, constructed in mediated discourse situations – layman, expert, mediator whose strategic speech behavior depends upon the balance of epistemic and affective components in their respective stances.

The process of diversification of the non-verbal communicative components in the modern English discourse

This article focuses on the specific properties of the combinability of non-verbal components with each other in the modern English discourse including the characteristics of their interaction with verbal components. The structural, semantic and pragmatic features of non-verbal components as well as their universal, ethnospecific and individually meaningful characteristics are taken into account. The paper is based on the discourse methodology in analysing communicative phenomena. The complex nature of communication is presented as the unity of verbal and non-verbal components within the anthropocentric paradigm in language and speech research. This paper provides the research of the combinability of non-verbal communicative components with each other, the result of which is presented by different clusters of non-verbal components taking into account the characteristics of a discursive personality upon which depend the ways of diversifying the information and emotion through non-verbal components. The analysis of discourse-constitutive potential of kinesic, proxemic and prosodic communicative components contributes to developing the theory of discursive interaction of different code systems aimed at the investigation of communicative signs of different nature in their unity within the frames of different types of discourse.

Event concept of EMPATHY in English juvenile fantasy prose

The article deals with the research of lingual cognitive and pragmatic aspects of empathy in juvenile fantasy prose. It reveals the nature of empathy from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, linguistic emotiology, and pragmalinguistics. The properties of empathy verbalization in juvenile fantasy prose are researched, namely the lexical and grammatical means of verbalization of the corresponding concepts and empathic illocutionary types of psychological support in discursive contexts of the English juvenile fantasy prose. The implementation of both pragmatic and lingual cognitive research findings in the light of cognitive-discursive paradigm revealed the basis of empathy conceptualization and the multifaceted empathic context. The interpretation of empathy meaning is performed by means of schematic cognitive mapping, as well as via establishing the correlation of empathy determinants in discursive contexts which present the communicative strategy of empathy. The componential analysis of definitions of various affective and cognitive states and processes connected with empathy, such as compassion, understanding, sympathy etc., as well as their antonyms, and determination of weight, status and hierarchy of the corresponding semes in vocabulary definitions, showed that generally accepted and empirically proved division of empathy into affective and cognitive is reflected in the language. The analyses revealed affective (feeling, sympathy, sorrow) cognitive (knowledge, ability, understanding) semes in the definitions of empathy types attributing them to either affective or cognitive group. Types of empathy, which belong to the same affective or cognitive group, are not equal in the degree of empathy manifestation. The factor or driving force for upgrading (or downgrading) to a different level is action. While partly addressing social functioning, empathy is turned to cognition and emotion, thus being framed as a social psychological event concept. As an event concept empathy emerges in consciousness and in verbal behavior under the influence of human activity in a certain communicative-pragmatic situation, arising in a variety of constituents of the cognitive and affective parcels of the domain of empathy and unfolding in two scripts which reflect its active and passive manifestations.

Manipulative tactics employed by Azerbaijani authors in online media resources

Recent investigations have established that manipulation is the abuse of language realized through various consciously employed linguistic means aimed to influence the listeners’ or readers’ social, interpersonal and mental states and behaviours, thus misdirecting their actions. Intentionality as one of the basic parameters of manipulation, no doubt, exercises a destructive effect on an individual, group or society at large. Depending on the range of their manipulative attitudes and intentions, often reaching beyond the bounds of morality, manipulators tend to bend reality, distort facts and through seemingly persuasive argumentation and proofs present their subjective reality as truth. This presupposes the employment of certain manipulative tactics and techniques meant to guarantee the manipulator’s success. The present case study attempts to expose the manipulative techniques and tactics deliberately employed by the Azerbaijani author of the article “Armenian So-Called Genocide”, published in the Azerbaijani online news medium “Azvision.az”. The object of the paper consists of a deep and thorough analysis of the manipulative intentions and interpretations worked into the mentioned article. On the basis of critical discourse-analysis, the application of the methods of argumentation, with references to empirical evidence, assists not only in observation of the mechanisms of manipulative techniques and tactics the author implements, but also reveals the persistence of Azerbaijani political circles toward the fulfilment of political goals through violations and falsifications of historical facts and distortions of reality.

Implementing manipulative strategies in legal speech

The article aims at exploring peculiar linguistic features of Legal English – a variety of thematically oriented language applied in the social domain. The focus is on the interaction of language and law and the linguistic maneuvering achieved by the manipulative strategies ap­plied to the use of language. The investigation is meant to show that linguistic manipulation may stimulate the occurrence of ambiguous expressions and double-speak even in legal documents, violating the basic function of law to communicate the truth and express clear-cut ideas. The research also reveals that the use of manipulative tools aimed to achieve practical ends is directly connected with domination and control over people’s perception and interpretation of objective facts. Of particular interest is the analysis of Turkishness (Turkish nation) in the legal texts of Article 301 of the Penal Code of Turkey (versions of 2005 and 2008) which, in fact is a dangerous challenge for the Turkish society, a real threat meant to endanger the fundamental right of humans to Freedom of Expression. The comparative-contrastive approach to the sources helps to reveal linguistic facts exposing the manipulative strategies implemented in the infamous Article 301 through which the Turkish political authorities try to exert a devious influence on the public and stifle dissenting opinion. The “amendments” introduced in the changed version of 2008 of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code had nothing to do with contextual improvements and were, in fact, an attempt to delude the European Union into believing that Turkish authorities had readily accepted its advice to amend the Article. The research establishes that the prevalence of politics over law is disastrous as it obviously leads to a covert resorting of manipulative strategies in legal speech and is meant to satisfy the best interests of those in power.

DISTRESS in English media: integrating cognitive-discursive and computational approaches

The study acknowledges that DISTRESS is a complex cognitive, linguistic, and social phenomenon conceptualized in media discourse by polarized lexical instantiations and conceptual metaphors. This paper focuses on discovering the contrual of DISTRESS and its cultural and contextual objectification in the social context of media discourse. The theoretical backbone comprises conceptual metaphor theory, discourse theory, frame semantics and field theories, and linguistic theory of emotions. Cognitive-discursive framework reinforced by the computational approach reveals communicative situations of distress and their contextual specifications governed by specific communicative strategies and tactics. Integration of discursive and computational analyses with the assistance of Voyant Tools, Textanz, and SentiStrength brings topicality and insightful revelations about the fragments as particular contexts of sociocultural knowledge about DISTRESS. Cognitive framework discloses preconceptual characteristics of DISTRESS, its lexicon, and metaphoric conceptualization on various levels of abstration. The frame model of DISTRESS represents knowledge and associations about the emotion and the interplay of sensory and symbolic information. Discursive framework underpinned by a versatile text analytical software tool Textanz 3.1.4 enables to identify the types, ratio, and shared values of participants in communicative situations of distress. Sentiment analysis by a software tool for social web texts SentiStrength 2.3 helps extract the strength of mixed emotions on a dual scale (positive/negative sentiments) that articulates evaluative attitudes towards the particular communicative situation of distress regulated by a particular communicative strategy.

In search of identity: trauma and irony in the cognitive light

For many decades Scottish Literature has produced characters that fitted well within the atmosphere of despair and inferiority undergone by the Scottish nation in the course of its history. The question of identity being at its heart, Scottish Literature has revealed a specific feature consisting in the frequent occurrence of traumatized, dual and split personalities. These are protagonists who in the force of Scotland’s history are traumatized and symbolize Scotland’s remarkable tradition of despair and the feeling of inferiority and powerlessness. However, a closer look at the contemporary Scottish female writing permits to take a new angle for exploring identity. Our approach accounts for the role of irony and humor that the characters provide. The fact of incongruity / trauma vs. irony/ creates a basis for insightful explorations of the dual essence of identity in A.L. Kennedy’s and J. Galloway’s writing in the light of such counter-concepts as emotional fulfillment vs. isolation, feminist vs. domestic expectations. Thus, our research within the frames of “Caledonian polysyzygy” aims at showcasing how and in what ways the cognitive study of the ironic component can contribute to the revelation of different aspects of identity crisis and survival. The features of the expression of irony are brought out with the help of cognitive metaphor, hyperbole, comparison, etc. It is argued that irony is based on the author's vision of the world and is characterized by the presence of explicit and hidden meanings which accounts for the clash between the vision and the reality. It is established that irony, a crucial aspect in the works of the mentioned authors, is a multi-layered cognitive and discursive phenomenon that aims to highlight the collision between thinking and reality.

The narrative multimedia concept: an algorithm for the analysis (internet-memes about COVID-19)

This research, done from the standpoint of linguistic concept-study and cognitive theory of naming, discusses the problems of meaning and its manifestations relevant for these two fields. The general conceptual space, constituted by the meanings of verbal and verbal-pictorial memes about COVID-19 (the data in Ukrainian and Russian) is considered as a narrative-based concept and structured via application of a particular methodology, which helps to build an ontology of this concept with its inherent thematic segments that have different degrees of accentuation. Internet-memes about COVID-19 are analyzed with regard to their content (integrated into the thematic segments of the narrative-based concept), and with regard to their form. It is maintained that the cognitive techniques for creating the memes' meanings include elaboration, extension, questioning and combining. The semiotic techniques that create the meme as a sign split into direct and indirect. The latter employ the inner form of a sign, its outer form, and the combination of both. The topic of creating the meme as a sign is extended with the discussion of hyperbole, paradox and absurdity as "laughter-evoking" techniques integrated into the meme's content. In focus, is the KORONAVIRUS narrative-based concept as the target entity with its particular interpretation and its specific ways of manifestation. A satellite topic is the KORONAVIRUS concept as a source utilized in characteristics of other entities.

Linguistic Means of Authorization in Modern English Magazine Discourse: Constructionist Rhetorical Approach

The article discusses the linguistic means of authorization in English magazine discourse. It proposes a definition of authorization and its discursive realization with the implementation of rhetorical canons and ways of persuasion. The linguistic means of authorization is represented by constructions which due to the fusion of form and meaning or form and function reflect the authorship – individual, institutional or collective. The paper distinguishes two types of constructions: deictic indicating individual authorization and impersonal pointing to the institutional authorship. With respect to the referential meaning of its constituents, deictic constructions fall into orientational fixing the author’s place in the environment: somatic relating to the author’s body; perceptual rendering visual, auditory or tactile modalities; locational referring to the author’s whereabouts. Constructions denoting an author’s activity refer to different spheres: cognitive; communicative; professional. Constructions referring to social relations reveal the addressor’s roles in two domains: immediate surroundings, covering family, friends, household as well as the wide public life encompassing politics and economics. Constructions appealing to pathos evoke evaluation, emotions or human needs uniting the author and readers. Constructions rendering institutional authorization represent the authors’ distance from the contents by four subtypes of subjective constructions: nominal, pronominal, predicative referring to event participants as well as discursive. Moreover, the functioning of deictic and impersonal constructions as authorization devices is subordinated to disposition with differing frequency. The collective authorship, which can be bi- and multiple, results from the interaction of constructions rendering individual and institutional authorization.