Discourse, cognition and society
Manuela Romano and María Dolores Porto
University Autónoma de Madrid / University of Alcalá
1. The ‘new’ social turn in cognitive linguistics
This volume explores the interaction between discourse, cognition and society.1 The chapters included all show the close, intrinsic relationship between cognitive linguistics and discourse studies, a relationship based mainly on a common approach to the study of language, that of language-in-use, and language as a dynamic, complex and interactive process in which discourse emerges online in real communicative contexts. The studies in this volume do not analyse discourse as a final product, but rather concentrate on discourse strategies, that is, how real discourse is built and interpreted in real interactions. One of the main defining features of the present collection of papers is, thus, the insistence on analysing real data in a wide variety of discourse types and socio-cultural situations, namely, TV reality shows, commercials, memorials, political debates, oral narratives, technical texts and digital stories. This is why the notions of strategy and socio-cognitive interaction are key to the volume, as well as multimodal and cross-linguistic, which are the perspectives chosen for the analysis of the different case studies. In addition, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual integration and creativity are central theoretical concepts in this work.
The first keyword defining this volume is discourse strategy. Starting from a general definition of strategy as “plan of action designed to achieve a major or overall aim” (OED), the expression discourse strategy/strategies has been widely used within discourse studies, from discourse analysis (Gumperz 1982; Menéndez 2005), text linguistics (de Beaugrande & Dressler 1981; Bernárdez 1995), and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992; Van Dijk 1993, 1997; Wodak & Meyer 2003), to interactional sociolinguistics (Schiffrin 1994), among others. In this volume, discourse strategy is used in its widest sense, as “all the resources (both verbal
1. This volume has been carried out under the funding of research project FFI2012-30790/ FILO, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
and non-verbal) that the speaker of a language consciously uses in order to build and interpret the discourses within the appropriate context, and in order to interact efficiently within communication”.2 This definition has been chosen because it emphasizes three crucial premises related to the usage-based and dynamic view of discourse followed in this volume, namely the importance of: (i) the specific socio-cultural context the discourse emerges in, (ii) the speaker’s intentionality or conscious use of language for specific purposes – search for attention or empathy, attempt to emotionally touch the listener, to persuade or influence his or her ideas or behaviour, etc. –, and (iii) the study of non-verbal or less prototypical discourses (pictorial, digital, gestural, etc.).
The focus on how real socio-cultural interactions affect discourse is one major point shared by the chapters collected for the volume. Even though the interest in the social aspects of language is not new (see Van Dijk 1985; de Beaugrande 1996; Gontier 2009; and Morales-López 2011 for historical overviews), we can say that discourse studies have undergone a second revival with the recent development of socio-cognitive models of language.3 Since the birth of the field in the late 60s with the emergence of many different but related disciplines and in many different countries (classical rhetoric, French structuralism, functional models of language, pragmatics, anthropology, ethnolinguistics, text linguistics, sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, speech act theory, semiotics, among others) – all interested in meaning and function, rather than syntax and form – discourse studies have not stopped absorbing and blending theoretical models and methodologies, as well as developing new areas of research. But it has been in the last years that the study of discourse, cognition and society has finally become intertwined within cognitive linguistics through the development of a new epistemology and its empirical tools.
Within cognitive linguistics, interest in social aspects of language can be traced back to the work of Langacker 1994, 2001; Geeraerts & Grondelaers 1995; Bernárdez 1995; Palmer 1996; Barlow 2000; Brandt & Brandt 2005; among others. Nevertheless, even though cognitive linguists have always advocated for usage-based foundation of language, it is not until the last decade that an increasing number of cognitive linguists – working both on the theoretical and empirical aspects of socio-cognitive approaches to language – have shown a renewed interest in the matter. This ‘new’ social turn within the field has had consequences for both the scope of study of the field and its methodology.
2. Authors’ translation from the Diccionario de Términos Claves de ELE (2008, in Sal-Paz & Maldonado 2009).
3. The origins of language-in-use proposals can be traced back to Aristotle’s Rhetorica
First, the new epistemology fostered by the first developments of cognitive linguistics, the idea that almost anything related to language is of interest for the field, has brought the progressive growth and blurring of disciplines and research areas, making the classification of recent work in the field – and in this volume – extremely difficult or even impossible. Metaphor studies, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, semantic change, sociolinguistics, etc. all seem to overlap nowadays making the umbrella term ‘discourse studies’ extremely useful and convenient.4 In addition, the data analysed have also seen an enormous growth and expansion. New modes and genres are continuously being created, blended and redefined into multimodal semiotic systems, which also push the theoretical and methodological tools in new directions. As Frank (2008) states, the comprehensive, cross-disciplinary character of cognitive linguistics is continuously redefining the limits of linguistics as a discipline, and so, there exists a constant crossing of boundaries that has brought a continuous merging of theoretical and methodological tools.
Second, the idea that an understanding of linguistic elements can only emerge in real socio-cognitive contexts has pushed the model a step forward towards the objectivist, realistic foundational premise supported by ‘first generation’ cognitivists (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987; Talmy 1988) by introducing social aspects of language as theoretical explanatory factors. Factors such as the real, specific linguistic and communicative situation, the socio-cultural and historical context, the intentions of participants, etc. are today at the centre of linguistic research. As Bernárdez (2009) points out, it is important to distinguish usage-based and use-based approaches. The first would coincide with the more abstract interest of cognitive linguists with social aspects of language, and the second, with the analysis of real contexts of use.
Finally, but not less important, the social turn in the field has also triggered, in the last decade, the growing acceptance that interpretative readings should be avoided within cognitive linguistics, and that scholars should, instead, look for experimental and corpus-based evidence to establish a more realistic link between linguistic variables and social meaning. If we want to understand what discourse means for its specific users in specific contexts, we need to analyse data in a systematic way. Hypotheses have to be corroborated in real data-driven studies, statistically evaluated and relevant. This is what has been called the ‘empirical turn’ in cognitive linguistics (Kristiansen et al. 2006; Stefanowitsch & Gries 2007; Kristiansen & Dirven 2008; Glynn & Fischer 2010; Pütz, Robinson & Reif 2014). Studies concerned with how to check cognitive hypotheses within natural
4. See, for instance, the new disciplines continuously being created: Cultural Linguistics, Cognitive Sociolinguistics, etc.
discourse data and corpora (Barlow & Kemmer 2000; Geeraerts, Kristiansen & Peirsman 2010; Speelman, Impe, Spruyt & Geeraerts 2013; Zenner, Kristiansen & Geeraerts, this volume, etc.) are developing fast these days. It is precisely to show the importance of empirically based work that case studies have been favoured in the compilation of chapters in this volume.
Within such a broad approach to discourse, which can be summarized in Fasold’s (1990: 65) definition of discourse: “the study of any aspect of language use”, the work included in this volume can be understood in terms of a radial category, whose members share some, but not necessarily all, of the following theoretical concepts: embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity – concepts that are still in a continuous process of change and expansion, as evidenced by their application to the different case studies presented in this volume.
The notion of embodiment, crucial in cognitive linguistics from its very foundation (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Langacker 1987) is still an elusive concept with multiple readings. Whereas the work of ‘first generation’ cognitive linguists mainly focused on the bodily, material basis of cognition and language, the concept has evolved towards a broader definition of embodiment that includes not only physical and cognitive, but also social embodiment as the ground for our conceptual and linguistic systems (Rohrer 2006, 2007).5 Thus, ‘second generation’ cognitivists rather focus on how an individual’s knowledge of language is embedded within collective cognition and culture (Ziemke et al. 2007; Frank et al. 2008). It is in this sense that the concept is applied in most of the studies included in the volume, even though the physical environment and bodily experience also play a crucial role in some of them (see Fabiszak’s chapter).
As a consequence, new concepts have been integrated in the cognitive framework to account for the new experientialist, socio-cognitive approach to embodiment. A first notion coming from philosophy, psychology and AI is situatedness, one of today’s keywords within the field, as in situated embodiment (Zlatev 1997), social situatedness (Linblom & Ziemke 2002), situated cognition (Smith & Semin 2004) and sociocultural cognition (Sharifian 2008, 2011, 2015), among others.6 Also, coming from morph-dynamic models of language and sociology, are the
5. Rohrer (2007) distinguishes up to twelve different senses in which the term embodiment can be used, which he finally groups into two main clusters: “embodiment as broadly experiential” and “embodiment as the bodily substrate” (p. 31).
6. This shift in the meaning and use of the term ‘embodiment’ is very well summarized in the titles of the two-volume set Body, Language and the Mind. Volume I (by Ziemke et al. 2007), which includes the subtitle Embodiment; whereas the subtitle of Volume II (by Frank et al. 2008) is Sociocultural Situatedness
notions of synergetic cognition or active-cognitive approach to language, which considers that language is a product of a socially-conditioned, activity-driven cognition, an essentially cultural and social object which is then incorporated in individuals (Bernárdez 2008b; Pishwa 2009). This approach, related to Bourdieu’s (1994) ‘habitus’, enables linguists and cognitive scientists to understand the role of social interaction (Bedny, Karwowski & Bedny 2001; Ghassemzadeh 2005) and such fundamental phenomena as linguistic interaction and communication (Müller & Carpendale 2001; Enfield 2009; Sharifian & Jamarani 2013), and the cognitive organisation of discourse and text (Garrod & Pickering 2004) among others.
In short, these new concepts are providing socio-cognitive models of discourse or language-in-use with a set of tools that explain the ways in which individual minds and cognitive processes are shaped by their interaction with sociocultural structures and practices by being together with other embodied minds; that is, the relationship between discourse, cognition and society.
Multimodality is another key concept in the chapters collected in this volume, partly as a consequence of the insistence on analysing real discourse events, since most discourse events are multimodal and “monomodality in comparison is not an actual quality of texts, but rather a way of thinking about individual semiotic resources once abstracted from the communicative ensembles in which they occur” (Page 2009: 4). Language studies have undergone a major shift to account fully for meaning-making practices (Kress 2010; O’Halloran 2004; Norris 2004) and have shown in the last two decades a renewed interest towards the integrated analysis of the multiple semiotic resources that contribute to the construction of meaning. Consequently, an accurate exploration of discourse strategies would not be complete without taking into account multimodality in order to understand how meaning emerges online by integrating multiple discourses, modes and data. Language is clearly not the only means of sense-making and communication; different non-verbal resources and modes carry different meanings, emotions and attitudes (Bednarek & Martin 2010). In this volume, multimodal discourse strategies are analysed in a great variety of situations to show how speakers/writers make use of different means – visual, acoustic, linguistic, gestural or even architectural – in order to make their discourse more expressive and persuasive, and how hearers or readers also use any kind of resources at hand to make sense of it. Closely related with the notion of integrating meanings in discourse, conceptual integration (Fauconnier 1985; Fauconnier & Turner 2002 among others) emerges as a powerful explanatory tool, fundamental to cognitive linguistics for the analysis of real multi-layered discourse and particularly for multimodality. In this volume, conceptual integration, or blending, is applied to oral narratives (Lugea, Rodríguez) and to digital stories (Molina & Alonso), not only to explore
how discourse participants blend linguistic meaning with that from other modes (visual images and videos, gestures, etc.), but also how meaning is constructed online by integrating linguistic and contextual information.
Metaphor has been predominant in cognitive linguistics since its very beginnings, but this is another concept that is being redefined within the new socialcognitive approaches. The social turn has also arrived for metaphor studies, which have moved or expanded their field of interest from considering metaphor (and metonymy) a creative thought-structuring device (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987; Gibbs 1994; Kövecses 2002) to understanding it as a creative social-cultural structuring device, as a need to create a new discourse for a new socio-cultural and historical situation. Bernárdez (2008a) relates metaphorical creativity with Bourdieu’s (1994) habitus, a concept which helps to explain metaphor as a social and cultural product that is transmitted individually from one generation to another, and which is cognitively integrated in the community in an unconscious way; the principles and guidelines of a culture and community, rather than simple linguistic expressions. Metaphor is thus at the heart of research within the field of socio-cognitive, activity-driven approaches to discourse as real agents of social transformation and reconstruction (Romano 2013, 2015). Besides, and in line with the growing interest in multimodal discourse as stated above, metaphor studies are also focusing more and more on multimodal metaphors (Forceville 2010; Forceville & Urios Aparisi 2009), i.e. those whose target and source are “rendered exclusively or predominantly in two different modes/ modalities” (Forceville & Urios Aparisi 2009: 4) and in metaphor in discourse (Semino 2008; Mussolf & Zinken 2009). Díaz’s, Roldán’s, and Soares’ work in this volume show how recent metaphorical studies have to be conducted in real sociocultural settings and discourses, as well as statistically proven.
A last cross-disciplinary notion present in all the chapters in this volume and commonly used in present-day analysis of discourse strategies is that of creativity. In recent years (Carter 2004; Carter & McCarthy 2004; Maybin & Swann 2007; Pennycook 2007, among others) this concept has developed from a vague, romantic view into a more practical, sound theory that regards creativity as a basic process present in any communicative and discursive event, also understood as a collective, negotiated act. In Stenberg’s (1999: 47) words, creativity is “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. adaptive concerning task constraint)”. This view of creativity fits in perfectly with the socio-cognitive models, which understand language and discourse as an action-based system, an adaptive system, which emerges from the interactions taking place in real communicative situations. Socio-cognitive models have provided thus a new notion of discursive creativity, which can be observed and analysed online by means of the immediacy of the new discourses or modes (Twitter,
Facebook, etc.) and the enormous possibilities of their technological tools (Porto & Romano 2013; Romano 2013, 2015).
The volume also comprises a group of studies with a cross-linguistic Spanish/ English approach. This work constitutes a conscious effort to show case studies in which more than one socio-cultural context is considered in order to demonstrate how discourse strategies differ not only across discourse types and modes, but particularly across languages and cultures. The fact that it is the same two languages/cultures which are compared in four different papers addressing diverse text types – technical, political, narrative – intends to demonstrate the significance of taking into account social, cultural and even historical matters when analysing real discourse events, since the results shown in these four papers are quite diverse depending on the focus of analysis – structural strategies, metaphorical mappings, ideological stance – and the speakers’ purposes – explanatory, persuasive, evaluative, search for empathy, etc.
Finally, most authors have combined different functional and cognitive approaches in their analyses. Thus, it is possible to find applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Mental Spaces and Conceptual Integration Theory, Appraisal Theory, Multimodal Semiotics, Narratology and Narrative Theory, Text World Theory or Critical Discourse Analysis in different combinations, which all contribute to a thorough exploration of the diverse discourse strategies that come into work in real interactions.
In short, even though the present volume presents only a small portion of the work being conducted today within socio-cognitive approaches to discourse, it reflects the still growing inter-disciplinary trend of the field, and provides a closer look at the relationship between the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing. i.e. discourse strategies, and the discourse community, that is, the actual collective construction of meaning in specific discourse situations. A great variety of discourse types and discursive situations are shown, but still there is a set of common theoretical and analytical tools shared by these works, namely, the view of discourse as an active, dynamic process, the essential role of context –in the broadest sense of the term – in discourse analysis, the need for multilingual, cross-linguistic studies, the pervasiveness of multimodality and creativity in real discourse and the value of conceptual integration and metaphor as tools to explain the process of meaning construction, the need for an ‘action-based’ approach to language and discourse, as well as the general acceptance that cognitive approaches to discourse need to be corroborated empirically and statistically.
The main goal of this volume is thus to further contribute to the crossdisciplinary dialogue initiated between cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis; that is, to bridge the gap between the more mental and social approaches to language and discourse from a socio-cognitive perspective. The usage-based
foundation of cognitive linguistics has clearly become use-based, as the social and interactional issues have gained ground within the field with the intention of understanding not only language and cognition, but also real social structures and behaviour, and with the intention of making explanations empirically relevant. Discourse studies are still growing hand in hand with the socio-cognitive models and still have much to say about the new emergent discourses, and the relationships between discourse structures, cognitive or mental structures and society, as this volume shows.
2. The chapters in this volume
As pointed out above, all the studies collected in this volume share a choice of the concepts presented in the previous section and so constitute a radial category, with a different emphasis on one or another of the key notions (embodiment, multimodality and creativity, and cross-linguistic analysis). It is this difference with respect to the focus of research which we have considered in order to present them in three main sections. It goes without saying, though, that most of them overlap and could also be included in any of the three sections distinguished.
The first section includes the chapters by Bernárdez, by Zenner et al. and by Soares. The three of them strongly emphasize the role of situatedness in discourse, that is, the need for analysing real case-studies in context.
Bernardez’s work gives a first detailed analysis of an allegedly metaphorical expression – this surgeon is a butcher –, which has been a favourite for cognitive linguists for decades, and has been largely discussed and analysed as a novel metaphor. The author reviews the two more influential articles on the blend, those by Grady et al. (1999) and by Brandt & Brandt (2005) and concludes that both of them have missed an important point: the historical, cultural and social context that has created a stable link between butchers and surgeons for over two thousand years. Consequently, Bernárdez warns of some common methodological mistakes in Cognitive Linguistics and of the dangers of studying language “in a solipsistic way”, i.e. without considering the historical and socio-cultural context in which discourse is produced. He also looks back on similar warnings as provided by linguists, as much as by philosophers and psychologists, that had already claimed long ago that language does not work in isolation and always depends on the interaction with others. His conclusions are in fact a checklist that all cognitive linguists should take into account in their studies.
In very much the same vein, the paper by Zenner, Kristiansen and Geeraerts insists on the importance of contextualization and of considering the actual complexity of a linguistic community. They warn cognitive linguists against the
“monolectal fallacy” that ignores socio-lectal variation and tends to pay attention only to written standard varieties. Moreover, the authors call attention to the value of quantitative analysis in order to reach reliable results as for inter- and intra-speaker variation. Following these guidelines, the chapter presents a detailed analysis of individual speakers’ variation as a strategy for identifying with a group in the frame of a gamedoc.7 The research focuses on two specific linguistic features: a phonemic one, below the level of awareness, and a morphological one that speakers are usually more aware of. Also, the study includes interactional and personal variables that are frequently neglected, such as the speakers’ profiles in the game as strategist or non-strategist players, depending on their “competitive spirit”, as well as situational features where speakers may decide to use “accommodation strategies” for the making up of the group. In a number of detailed tables, analyses show that the register shifts in the strategist speakers’ speech constitute a deliberate strategy to win the game. Once again, the notions of embodiment and situatedness become most relevant in the research as the authors claim an “extension of interactional sociolinguistics” towards a “higher-order” interaction between situation- and speaker- related features in sociolinguistics.
Situatedness is also central in Soares’s work on austerity metaphors in Portugal. Following a corpus-based approach to the analysis of the metaphors in the press over two separated time periods in 2011 and 2013, the author provides empirical evidence that mental representations are constructed in discursive social interaction and also, that those mental representations serve a persuasive, manipulative purpose. The difference between the metaphors used in these two periods reveal a significant change in the way in which austerity policies were conceptualised by Portuguese people. Thus, in the first period, the metaphors identified are grounded in moral cultural models (good student, sacrifice, diet for an obese body) in order to give austerity and drastic cuts a positive moral connotation. On the contrary, the metaphors in the second period present austerity in a more negative sense: as a heavy burden, a painful therapy and even as war or death. This change reflects the perception of the Portuguese that austerity policies were wrong and so protests against them increased notably. The combination of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis provides evidence that the austerity metaphors in Portugal are socially embodied, grounded in cultural, ideological and moral values, which make them an instrument for manipulation.
The second group of chapters all share a major concern with the analysis of multimodal discourse. Digital stories, TV commercials and architectural
7. A TV reality game where different participants compete in physical, intellectual and social challenges.
memorials are the notably disparate kinds of discourse selected as case study in the three articles presented in this section. However, their results seem to converge in similar conclusions about the leading role of social interaction for the construction of meaning.
Molina and Alonso examine the “micro and macro strategies” used by both producers and interpreters of a digital story in order to construct meaning. By combining a multimodal functional analysis and a cognitive oriented one, the authors first analyse the three modes separately – the verbal representation, the visual-spatial representation and the audio representation. Next, they unravel the cognitive processes by which these representations or mental spaces are integrated in order to construct a “global, emergent meaning” that goes far beyond the mere addition of the information provided by the three modes. According to Molina and Alonso, the same strategies come to work at a micro level, when every image is displayed accompanied by words and music, and at a macro level contributing to the general structure and coherence of the story. Naturally, a special section is devoted to the study of multimodal metaphors, which also operate at both levels, so evidencing their “dynamic and highly contextualized character”. Finally, the combination of the multimodal functional approach and the Conceptual Integration Theory reveals how close both frameworks are, since they both describe similar processes of meaning construction.
Similarly, Hidalgo-Downing, Kraljevic and Martínez present TV commercials as an instance of multimodal narratives. As in the previous paper, the authors also choose to combine two different frameworks of analysis, examining cosmetics ads through the interaction of a multimodal analysis and a narrative approach. The authors point out that “the TV ads in this study seem to present the advertised product as the external event causing changes of state in the multimodally projected storyworld”. Thus, several features of images – colour, brightness, angles, shots… and sound – loudness, pitch, rhythm… are considered and matched with textual features and narrative organization. Multimodal metaphors also play a leading role in their study, as a device to summarize the main point of the ad and its potential evaluation. The results demonstrate consistent differences in the multimodal resources employed by those ads that start their narratives with the end-point of the story and those which maintain the chronological order of events. Persuasive strategies are further disclosed in the more detailed analysis of four of these commercials that expose the way in which the audience is “pushed” into the acceptance of the product.
The chapter by Fabiszak introduces an unusual multimodal discourse analysis, as her case studies are architectural Holocaust memorials. Fabiszak explores not only the interaction between verbal and visual modes, but also how “the change in the dominant discourse strategies affected the design of the memorials”, that is,
the way in which the socio-cultural context influences the design and interpretation of these memorials. Once more, the author combines a cognitive framework of analysis, namely Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Image Schemata, with a functional one, that of Critical Discourse Analysis. Unsurprisingly, the notions of embodiment and situatedness are recurrent in this analysis as the meaning construction is only possible when the audience physically enters and moves around the memorials, which are both culturally and geographically situated in extermination sites. The physical experiences of narrowness, roughness, light, coldness, etc. are the source domains of metaphorical projections that allow the visitors to form an empathetic bond with the victims of the Holocaust. Besides, the different dates of design and construction of the monuments evidence the way in which those meanings interact with the socio-cultural contexts.
The last group of chapters is formed by those which have chosen a crosslinguistic perspective (English-Spanish) in their exploration of discourse strategies. Oral narratives, political debates and technical texts are the data for these studies. The fact that they all examine the same two languages is also enlightening, as it is possible to observe how the same cultural contexts can influence discourse in different ways. The first two papers in this section focus on metaphors and the two last on the narrative structure of oral narratives.
Roldán analyses zoomorphic metaphorical mappings in Civil Engineering terminology; more specifically she deals with the fact that visual images, i.e. external appearance that resembles animals or parts of animals, prompt the metaphorical projections reflected in the technical terminology. In spite of the apparent universality of such an approach, the results of her contrastive analyses suggest that the correspondence between terms in both languages is not systematic. In her research, the author considers the special features of the Civil Engineering discourse community, as well as some socio-cognitive aspects of this specific discourse common to English and Spanish, such as the overarching metaphor an engineering structure is a living being, which obviously leads to the more specific animal-based mappings, both metaphorical and metonymical, considered in the analysis – cracked pavement is an alligator’ skin or an excavating machine is a mole. Interestingly, the author concludes from her study that names of animals for machines and tools are more common in English, whereas in Spanish it is the names of parts of animals – paws, nails, feathers, wings – which are more frequent. However, this has not always been the case and she refers to previous studies that claim that more animal names were used in Spanish in the 16th century that have now become obsolete. Thus, she suggests that cultural and historical reasons could account for the terminological variation between English and Spanish.
For her contrastive analysis of metaphors in political discourse, Díez draws on a combination of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis and Appraisal Theory. The author analyses in detail, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the metaphorical expressions of economy and government used by the two main opponents for the 2011 General Election in Spain. Next, she compares the results with similar metaphors in an American pre-electoral debate between Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008. It is noteworthy that her results on two real discourse events contradict the classical view first posed by Lakoff (1996/2002) that right-wing parties favour the strict parent metaphor against the nurturant parent usually associated with the left-wing. Moreover, similarities and differences can be found in both debates, as a consequence of similarities and differences in their contexts. Both Spain and USA were suffering a profound economic crisis, but American society was particularly concerned at the time by the war in Iraq and this circumstance influenced the topic of discourse and its metaphors. Curiously enough, similarities between the metaphorical expressions used by the candidates seem to depend more on their actual position, i.e. in Government or in opposition, than on their ideological traits. In this work, metaphors reveal a powerful evaluative device in political discourse in order to present themselves as the best solution, but, as Díez points out, it is their purpose, and not their political agenda that points the way.
In the next chapter, Lugea compares temporal world building strategies in English and Spanish oral narratives. She combines Text World Theory and Mental Spaces Theory in order to account for the mental representations of temporal events in discourse. These representations are influenced by context, including all the experiential and cultural knowledge that participants in discourse bring for the joint construction of the meaning. Her comprehensive analysis takes into account different varieties of both languages, namely British and American English on one side and Peninsular and Latin American Spanish on the other. Among the differences that Lugea observes in her analysis, it is particularly interesting the way in which English speakers use a more subjective point of view in their narratives, often featuring themselves in the narration to include their perspective on it, whereas Spanish speakers show a more extensive access to the character’s mental states and thought processes, which makes them more involved in the story to the point of predicting future events. In addition, the American English and Peninsular Spanish preference for the present as anchor tense illustrates their tendency to use tenses in “creative and empathetic ways” rather than purely temporally deictic ones. Such results suggest that the differences between varieties have more to do with historical, socio-cultural features than with merely linguistic ones.
Gestures are the object of analysis of the last chapter in this volume, by Rodríguez, particularly the way in which gestures structure two oral narratives,
one by a British speaker and one by a Spanish one. Mental Spaces Theory, both as applied to narratives and also for the analysis of gestures, becomes a useful analytical tool to examine the way in which speakers use gestures to guide their listeners through the fragmented unfolding of the oral narratives. First, the different fragments or narrative spaces that compose each narrative are distinguished. Next, those fragments are matched with the gestures employed by the speakers to signal shifts between those fragments or segments. Finally, the comparison of both narratives shows that the Spanish speaker tends to use gestures in order to mark the structure of the narrative, whereas the British one is more concerned with highlighting the most relevant ideas or events in the story, using gestures as attentional devices. Rather than drawing general conclusions from her analysis, the author intends to suggest a fruitful field of research and to present some useful analytical tools for this kind of comparative studies.
All in all, this volume intends to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of discourse studies through a detailed analysis of the specific strategies that participants bring into play. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Multimodality, Narratology, Appraisal Theory, Sociolinguistics, etc. Furthermore, the emphasis made by the authors on analysing real data in specific socio-cultural interactions, as well as the cognitive perspective shared by all the studies, match the requirements of the new trends in Discourse Analysis, as put forward by Van Dijk (2014), by considering the three dimensions of discourse: discursive, cognitive and social (political, cultural and historical). Socio-cognitive approaches to language and discourse provide the flexible framework required to integrate these three dimensions, as well as to break down the theoretical and methodological frontiers still present in the field.
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