Cognitive Stylistics of News Media: The Case of Political Scandals and Its Impact on European Communities (Joint presentation with M. Siskou, To be presented in 5th ESHS, Athens, November 2012)

This paper investigates the mechanism of stylistics in European newspaper articles, headlines and magazines by focusing on instances of public scandals with regard to economy, law and politics. We will analyze the way in which the cognitive processes of metaphor and metonymy constitute the vehicle of persuasion by shaping public opinion and highlighting specific events. In particular, we will attempt to support the view that metaphor and metonymy -when used in news- serve not only as the media of communication but also affect public thought and simultaneously construct ideology. These cognitive processes act as the facilitators of conceptualization and comprehension of news events since they appeal immediately to the readership’s mental apparatus, irrespective of national, cultural and social characteristics, and educational background.

Furthermore, a cognitive analysis of media language may imply that metaphor and metonymy mediate the gist of the current scandal by communicating its message to the target readership. More precisely, we will try to propose that such kind of mediation occurs when these two cognitive processes are used in order to render a public scandal accessible to a wider audience. Hence, we shall claim that their ubiquitous character narrows down the conceptual distance of the sheer event by facilitating its conceptualization, internalization and comprehension by the reader.

For instance, in the case of “the Stonehouse Scandal” the metonymy “cash for honours” (The Daily Telegraph, March 2010) triggers the issues of morality and ethics by parallelizing and further identifying “honours” to “cash”. The metonymy degrades the positive connotations of the notion “honours”, which happens to be culturally entrenched to the British value system, by reflecting negative connotations through its association and identification with “cash” and further urges the reader to consider the possibility of equating something moral to something material and maybe of a less ethical value. Consequently, the mechanism of stylistics on the basis of metaphor and metonymy infiltrates the public scandal by orienting audience’s attention to specific linguistic elements, which are thematically related with the issues of politics, law and economy and shape ideology.

English Phrasal Verbs: A Case of Metonymy (To be presented in 19th International Congress of Linguistics, Geneva July 2013)

This paper studies English phrasal verbs on the basis of their spatial and temporal aspects that lead to their conceptualization and expression, and argues that this is a case of metonymy. Metonymy, as a fundamental cognitive process, is not only embedded, but also entrenched in the way humans orient and locate themselves and their actions in the world by grounding them in space and time. In this sense, the referential function of metonymy, which is embodied in our mental apparatus by encompassing universal and individual experiences, serves as the mediating point of encoding, decoding, internalizing, designating, shaping, expressing and producing phrasal verbs.

In particular, I will attempt to propose that the metonymic nature of English phrasal verbs could be analyzed by virtue of spatio-temporal aspects, which are reflected on the verb and its particles. Either the verb or the particle, or even both may be of equal dominance. Such a multidimensionality -with regard to space and time- allows speakers to construct mental relations concerning the actors interacting in an event, their activity, instruments, tools and affected objects or products. For instance, if we consider a sentence like they were in the area last night so they dropped in, but we were not home, we can understand that the phrasal verb drop in, stands for the action of making a visit to someone, without making any special arrangements.

I further support that in the case of phrasal verbs, the verb-particle combination entails the existence of a source (the location of the particular event: home), a path (the process of making the action of dropping in, grounded in space and time: in the area, last night) and a vehicle (the actors interacting in the event: they, we).  In this respect, the syntactic form of phrasal verbs (verb-particle construction) is governed by their semantic content, which is based on a certain kind of metonymic mapping that occurs within a single domain and shifts reference from the primary domain, which is secondary in the literal meaning (Croft 2002). Thus, when the particle is attached to the verb, an idiomatic expression arises: particles’ metonymic properties shift and extend the normal and prototypical meaning of the verb into a more idiomatic sense.

Lastly, the paper will investigate the metonymic readings of phrasal verbs on the ground of image-schemas representations, which may be explained from the particles’ metonymic properties. I will try to support the view that phrasal verbs reflect image schemas. In particular, I regard the verb-particle combinations as governing image schemas such as container (fill in, move in, take in, stand out, find out), part-whole relationship (break up, use up, come down with), linkage (get together, meet with), separation (break down, come apart), front-back orientation (call back, drop back, pay someone back), proximity and distance (prevail upon, shy away from, get rid of) and up-down orientation (go up, slow down, let down, keep down).