This volume looks at spatialization of abstract concepts in verbo-pictorial aphorisms at work in the cartoons of a single artist. While extensive work has been done in studying spatialization of abstract concepts in grammar and lexicon within cognitive linguistics, this book is the first of its kind to provide a detailed account of such phenomena in multimodal discourse. The volume integrates a range of approaches from cognitive linguistics, including image schema theory, conceptual theory of metaphor, multimodal metaphor theory, the dynamic approach to metaphor, and a multimodal approach to metonymy, and applies this multi-faceted framework to a selection of cartoons from the work of Polish artist Janusz Kapusta. Taken together, these cartoons form the basis of two comprehensive case studies which explore the abstract concepts of "emotions" and "life," highlighting the ways in which cartoons can illustrate the important relationship between space, situated cognition, and language and in turn, a clear and systematic framework for establishing cohesive ties between the verbal and pictorial modes in multimodal cognitive linguistic research. The volume sheds new light on visual thinking and multimodal rendition of creative abstract thought.

Metaphor studies is a vibrant and fascinating field. The present book brings together the work of influential researchers analyzing metaphor empirically from Critical Socio-Cognitive perspectives (CSCDA). The case studies focus on the role of metaphor as a powerful strategy for the creation of specific world views and ideological frames, as well as for their contestation in current crises.

This concise volume addresses the question of whether or not language, and its structure in literary discourses, determines individuals’ mental ‘vision,’ employing an innovative cross-disciplinary approach using readers’ drawings of their mental imagery during reading. The book engages in critical dialogue with the perceived wisdom in stylistics rooted in Roger Fowler’s seminal work on deixis and point of view to test whether or not this theory can fully account for what readers see in their mind's eye and how they see it. The work draws on findings from a study of English and Dutch across a range of literary texts, in which participants read literary text fragments and were then asked to immediately draw representations of what they had seen envisioned. Building on the work of Fowler and more recent theoretical and empirical language-based studies in the area, Klomberg, Schilhab and Burke argue that models from embodied cognitive science can help account for anomalies in evidence from readers’ drawings, indicating new ways forward for interdisciplinary understandings of individual meaning construction in literary textual interfaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in stylistics, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, particularly those working in embodied cognition.

This book explores the impact of new media on politicians’ construction, presentation, and dissemination of their political selves, focusing on the social media presence of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to offer new insights into the landscape of contemporary political discourse. Drawing on work from corpus linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis, Aiello charts the ways in which the politician employed a range of discursive strategies via social media in her first campaign to introduce her political identity to a wider audience, and the subsequent responses by media outlets. The volume examines how she continued to solidify her political agenda throughout the course of her tenure, unpacking her crafting of counterattacks and “clapbacks,” in particular, in counteracting delegitimizing attacks from both mainstream media outlets and user-generated content. Aiello brings these insights together to offer a more holistic understanding of American political discourse but also the intersection of language, power, ideology, and the role of social media in modern political campaigns and populist discourses. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in digital communication, political communication, critical discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics.

This concise volume offers an accessible introduction to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) language models, providing a platform for their use in textual interpretation across the humanities and social sciences. The book outlines the affordances of new technologies for textual analysis, which has historically employed established approaches within the humanities. Neuman, Danesi, and Vilenchik argue that these different forms of analysis are indeed complementary, demonstrating the ways in which AI-based perspectives echo similar theoretical and methodological currents in traditional approaches while also offering new directions for research. The volume showcases examples from a wide range of texts, including novels, television shows, and films to illustrate the ways in which the latest AI technologies can be used for "dialoguing" with textual characters and examining textual meaning coherence. Illuminating the potential of AI language models to both enhance and extend research on the interpretation of texts, this book will appeal to scholars interested in cognitive approaches to the humanities, in such fields as literary studies, discourse analysis, media studies, film studies, psychology, and artificial intelligence.

Antonyms in Mind and Brain presents a multi-method empirical investigation of opposition with a particular focus on the processing of opposite pairs and their representation in the mental lexicon. Building on recent cognitive accounts of antonymy which highlight the fundamentally conceptual nature of antonymy, this book outlines previous literature to draw out criteria for good opposites and establish the state of the art on the question whether the strong connection of certain opposite pairs is primarily of a conceptual or lexical nature. presents a detailed cross-linguistic empirical study combining corpus data, speaker judgements and behavioural experiments for a wide range of central (e.g. big:little) and peripheral (e.g. buy:sell; wife:husband) opposite pairs to establish the contribution of individual factors. proposes a model of the representation of opposite pairs in the mental lexicon and illustrates how the processing consequences of such a model account for the patterns observed in the data. The approach taken in this book highlights the importance of using a number of different methods to investigate complex phenomena such as antonymy. Such an approach forms the empirical foundation for a dynamic psycholinguistic model of opposition based on the conventionalisation and entrenchment of the conceptual and lexical relationship of antonyms.

The overarching theme of Discourse and Technology is cutting-edge in the field of linguistics: multimodal discourse. This volume opens up a discussion among discourse analysts and others in linguistics and related fields about the two-fold impact of new communication technologies: The impact on how discourse data is collected, transcribed, and analyzed—and the impact that these technologies are having on social interaction and discourse. As inexpensive tape recorders allowed the field to move beyond text, written or printed language, to capture talk—discourse as spoken language—the information explosion (including cell phones, video recorders, Internet chat rooms, online journals, and the like) has moved those in the field to recognize that all discourse is, in various ways, "multimodal," constructed through speech and gesture, as well as through typography, layout, and the materials employed in the making of texts. The contributors have responded to the expanding scope of discourse analysis by asking five key questions: Why should we study discourse and technology and multimodal discourse analysis? What is the role of the World Wide Web in discourse analysis? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in studies of social actions and interactions? How does one analyze multimodal discourse in educational social interactions? and, How does one use multimodal discourse analyses in the workplace? The vitality of these explorations opens windows onto even newer horizons of discourse and discourse analysis.

The creative potentiality of metaphor is one of the central themes in research on creativity. The present volume offers a space for the interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between metaphor and creativity by focusing on (re)contextualization across modes and socio-cultural contexts and on the performative dimension of creative discourse practices. The volume brings together insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, (Critical) Discourse approaches to metaphor and Multimodal discourse analysis. Creativity as a process is explored in how it emerges in the flow of experience when talking about or reacting to creative acts such as dance, painting or music, and in subjects’ responses to advertisements in experimental studies. Creativity as product is explored by analyzing the choice, occurrence and patterning of creative metaphors in various types of (multimodal and multisensorial) discourses such as political cartoons, satire, films, children’s storybooks, music and songs, videos, scientific discourse, architectural reviews and the performance of classical Indian rasa.

"Drawing on a wide range of examples, Kress and Van Leeuwen outline an approach to social discourse in which colour plays a role equal to language, and show how two kinds of thought processes interact in the design and production of communicative messages: 'design thinking' and 'production thinking', the kind of thinking which occurs in direct interaction with the materials and media used. Above all the authors stress communicative practice and interactivity. Their question throughout is: how do people use communicative modes and media in actual, concrete, interactive instances of communicative practice?" "This book is a text for courses in language, media and communication willing to take on the theoretical challenges posed by multimodality, multimedia and multi-skilling, and it provides inspiring theoretical input for courses in interactive multimedia design."--BOOK JACKET.