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

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

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.

Far from being rhetorical ornaments, metaphors play a central role in public discourse, as they shape the structure of political categorisation and argumentation. Drawing on a very large bilingual corpus, this book, now in paperback, analyses the distribution of 'metaphor scenarios' in more than a decade of public discourse on European integration, elucidating differences in UK and German attitudes and argumentation. The corpus analysis leads to a refinement of cognitive metaphor theory by systematically relating conceptual, semantic and argumentation levels and incorporating the historical dimension of metaphor evolution. Finally, drawing on examples of metaphor negotiation and on a reassessment of Hobbes' concept of metaphor in Leviathan, the book highlights the ethical dimension of metaphor in politics.