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).

The Multidisciplinary Nature of Media Discourse

Media language needs the combination of more than one discipline for its complete examination and understanding. The operational function of advertisements triggers common sense knowledge by accounting on multiple dimensions of discourse such as philosophical, linguistic, psychological, sociological and anthropological. Knowledge of media language presupposes the grounding of the former notions into our perceptual apparatus; knowledge is expressed conveyed, accepted and shared in the discourse of advertising by further defining its nature as not only social, but also as cultural and subjective. Advertising is the body of multiple types of knowledge since its systematic analysis endows with not only the comprehension of a particular passage, but also with local and global knowledge a particular object signifies on the grounds of verbal and non-verbal processes of conceptualization. In other words, advertising entails a double association -in certain cases even a double dissociation- between meaning-interpretation and meaning-realization. 

Interpretability constraints of media discourse are based on the concept of a multidisciplinary matrix, which examines language from both an insider’s perspective (the surface structure of passages) and from an outsider’s perspective (meaningful remarks derived from visual, aural and auditory modalities. Commercials represent a synthesis of global behaviors with the individual’s experiences, resulting in an interactional discourse which further constitutes the reification of the given product as the image of the market on the one hand and the image a single consumer expects to obtain on the other. As long as the market remains relatively stable, fluctuating within predictable advertising techniques, the individual is disposed to operate according to the established attitudes (buy, or not a particular product). However, when the market produces such fluctuations that the individual is not able to locate with a single reading, old practices of advertising, are replaced by new ones, in our case subliminal images.

According to Danesi (2002: 179) advertising derives from the Medieval Latin verb “advertere”, which means to “direct one’s attention to”; it designates any type of public announcement and representation in order to promote the sale of specific commodities and services. According to Cook (1992: 3) advertisements are interactions of multiple elements such as language, paralanguage, participants, society, situations, pictures, music, other ads and discourses. The purpose of ads concerns the substances of attention getting, talking microchips, novel substance and lastly fixing the product more firmly by actively involving the reader (1999: 25). Lastly, it is should be noted that the difference between advertising and any other kinds of representations and activities lies on the fact that it aims at influencing judgments, attitudes and behaviors.

Advertisements need multidimensional readings in order to perceive their intended messages, if not entirely, at least approximately. The analysis of the particular genre demands two axes of organization: i) analyzing by virtue of synthesizing multiple disciplines and ii) embedding and de-embedding the multiple dimensions in the representational functions of commercials. The body of commercials entails the perception and the internalization of a stylistic structure, which functions as a mental path leading to the semantization and thematization of their persuasive nature. The structure of commercials is highly descriptive since it simply denotes a specific quality or quantity of the product, which has to be in proportion with consumers’ needs and desires. The dependency of advertisements on not only linguistic dimensions, but also on multiple discourses, leads in their enrichment and revitalized nature.

In particular, Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 258) argue for a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situations, institutions and social structures that frame it. They speak of discourse as a form of social practice, which embodies variables ranging from ideology and power, to hierarchy, gender and sociology. As for advertising, we could hypothesize that it is in parallel relations with the social aspects of human behavior so that to embody the linguistic information in the societal dimension that patterns the habitus.

But what is habitus and how can we define it in relation to modernity? And if habitus is associated with modernity, what is its impact on advertisements? Many scholars agree that the habitus is an aspect of human behavior on the grounds of ideology and socialization. As the following definitions show, habitus is an innate and universal aspect of human cognition. In particular, Bateson, Elias and Scollon claim that:

“The notion of the habit is a major economy of conscious thought” (Bateson [1942] 1972: 141).

“Social and physical habitus are interrelated and social and physical habitus are transformations of habitus resulted in historical change” (Elias 1939, 1968).

“Habitus is a set of generative dispositions and has its ontogenesis in the earliest development of social and cognitive life” (Scollon 2003: 176).

Therefore, habitus could be treated as a kind of embodied ideology as it constitutes a set of socially learnt dispositions, the acquisition of which is held through the activities and experiences of everyday life.

According to Scollon (2003:179) the modern world has reconstructed national habitus as the image of the society on the one hand and the image of the individual personality on the other. In other words, habitus could be defined as a mental structure functioning in the realization of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. Social changes establish transformations by restructuring the habitus as old practices are replaced by new. As the world we live in constantly changes, the acts that we perform and our attitude towards them also has to change. On the grounds of the pattern of social transformations, we could further suppose that advertisements have to adjust their ideological and attitudinal character in proportion to the current social settings.  

In addition to the socio-cognitive definition on habitus, Myles (2010: 20) argues for its relation with mass media by proposing that the linguistic habitus acts as a constraint in media because the embodied nature of language is not only subject to the determinations of the market, but also to the type of “orchestrating” located in the habitus. To me, this assumption could be based on the fact that media has autonomy vis-à-vis the social field because it shapes or it is shaped from the transparency and immediacy of human experiences and ideologies. Media discourse embraces a sociological view of language that subordinates the non-arbitrariness of linguistic meaning in order to stress the necessity of persuading and promoting specific values and moralities.

Besides the above, the social dimension of advertising encodes two kinds of knowledge for discourse processing. Firstly, personal and group knowledge shapes mental models for the interpretation of the advertised message. After that, this knowledge becomes socially and culturally shared, if we consider the multiplicity of the channels of message transmission, like television, radio, magazines, newspapers, Internet, films etc. According to van Dijk (2003: 106) discourse processing correlates with social knowledge and demands a systematic analysis on the basis of four steps: i) comprehension of a passage through a huge amount of general knowledge, ii) local and global coherence, iii) presupposition of knowledge and iv) context model knowledge.

Moreover, media language is established in public space on the basis of generating power and further linking the concept of power with legitimacy and public discourse (Benhabib 1992: 80-1). Power is a fundamental concept of commercials, it is entrenched in the way the market presents products; however, power should not be solely described as a moral value originated by individualistic behaviors. I view that the concept of power is an abstraction of the processing language of commercials; power is not restricted to people, it is rather endowed with entities and objects. Habermasian philosophy explores the notion of public space in a dual manner: at a primary level the public sphere is approached as an institutional mechanism for rationalizing political and any other type (in our case advertising) domination and, at a secondary level the public sphere illustrates public opinion (Fraser 1992: 112-13).

With regard to advertising, I would like to stress that the notion of public sphere is governed by the derivative relationship between a logical object and a passive subject or, between a passive object and a logical object. According to me, commercials are inclusive devices of an object, which has to be entrenched in subjects’ choices; the given product stands for the object, which is either active –when it is represented by agents- or passive –when it is represented alone (for example, display commercials which singly illustrate products, without any particular setting). The subject stands for consumers’ public space; if the product is presented in a communicative environment surrounded from agents, consumers seem to passively and effortlessly process its message. However, if the product stands alone (for example, in certain display advertisements alcohol drinks are illustrated without any agents), the public sphere -consumers- need to process the intended message of commercials in a more active manner; they need to seek for the degree of desirability and necessity in buying the advertised object.

Lastly, Garnham (1992: 365, 367) claims that media communication synthesizes ideologies based upon face-to-face communication in a single physical space because, what has become mediated is the content of communication and the subject of debate. Could we further assume that what is physically shared, is lost? If we suppose that mass media focus on the necessary material resource base for any public sphere, we could further assert that markets tend to distribute advertisements on the basis of what a public sphere seeks to obtain. However, in a pluralistic perspective markets seek to influence subjects at a public point, which puts its grounds on individual constraints. As a result, the public space of advertising is mediated by a general social ideology reflected in an external reality that has to be subject to personal experiences and behaviors.  

Approaching the language of politics in a Cognitive manner

The title implies the non-literal use of language of politics and will focus on the metonymic use of /here/ and /there/ in speeches from the Hellenic Parliament; in other words I will argue on schematic transformations of the metonymic models of /edo/ and /eki/. The analysis will not be based on a discourse approach, rather on a cognitive one. 


Politics like all spheres of social activity, has its own code, a term used by linguists to refer to a language 
           variety of a particular group. The cognitive process that relates literal meanings to extended       
            meanings is known as mapping. Mapping is the projection of one set of conceptual entities 
            onto another set of conceptual shifts. We mentally trace a path from a conceptually salient   
            conceptual entity to another conceptual entity. I.e.) /πως φτάσαμε ως εδώ/ à politicians/ 
            economic situation The notion of salient/ saliency is a reference point which allows to access     
            another conceptual entity, the target.

Speakers are likely to employ hyperbole in the course of what can broadly be considered political activities. Metaphor and metonymy act as mechanisms to bring the audience to see the facts at issue in the way the speakers want them to see these facts.“When the speaker senses the possibility that the members of the audience have a value which will work to his/hers advantage, if he/she can stimulate them to experience a fantasy concerning the consequences of the facts as he/she wants them seem, the probability of hyperbole being used increases even more” (Swartz; 1976:113).

Since we are dealing with political speech the conceptualization of time and place in virtue of metonymy is grounded by the relation of a situation to the experience of the speaker. The speaker is the reference point of time and place. Temporal cognition is one aspect of conceptual structure which relates to our conceptualization of time. Unlike space, time is not a concrete or physical sensory experience. Temporal experience is both phenomenologically real and subjective. Subjective experience of time is not a single unitary phenomenon; it is compromised of experiences such as our ability to access & perceive duration, simultaneity and points of time.

The spatio-temporal anchoring of our language is not only the basis of our understanding of linguistic messages, but also the basis for anticipating certain kinds of linguistic messages. We locate entities and situations spatially and each of these expressions carries a different degree of explicitness in the encoding referents of the world. Explicitness incorporates the weighted relevance of various conceived elements of the situation with respect to the communicative intent of the speaker.

Talmy (1983) and Langacker (1986, 1988) observed that the way we locate objects with respect to one another involves the recognition of some kind of asymmetrical relation between the object we want to locate and the object with respect to which we locate it. According to them, asymmetrical relations are recognized with respect to size, containment, support, orientation, order, direction, distance, motion, or a combination of these. For Svorou (1993) a spatial-arrangement of two entities may be described in a number of ways, each of which constitutes a ‘construal’.

Examples:

1. "Εμείς είμαστε εδώ και θα παραμείνουμε εδώ, ενώ εσείς είστε και θα παραμείνετε εκεί"

/ekei/ in this context means ‘away from’; according to Talmy it refers to the motion of a schematically Figure along a path that progressively increases its distance from a schematically pointlike Ground. 

2. «Πώς φτάσαμε ως εδώ»

The utterance is a part of a political debate in the Hellenic Parliament. One representative of a political party elaborates on argumentation against the insufficient politics of the other political party. Despite the fact that the intended referent is not explicitly mentioned (the politician instead of using the personal pronoun, uses edo) the conveyed message is understood by the hearer since, a new politial conversation arised [Μιλάτε εσείς για το πώς φτάσαμε εδώ]

Thus, Time and Space are the starting points to conceptualize the metonymic uses of /edo/ & /ekei/. We cannot separate time from space in order to argue for metonymic alteration. The dominant image schema is that of container, part-whole and vice versa, diversion and splitting since the examples were drawn from political debates between the representatives of the political parties in the Hellenic Parliament. 

This brief paper is a part of a conference presentation, which will take place in Belgium, 2011. 

Critical Realism in the New Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdisciplinarity and Citizenship

Capitalism has the capacity to overcome crisis by radically transforming itself periodically so that economic growth and profitability can continue; by virtue of such a transformation towards 'New Capitalism' the modification of restructuring relations between economic, political and social domains occurred.

The common idea of new capitalism as a 'knowledge-based' socio-economic order implies that it is also discourse-driven. The significance of language in these transformations endow with the performative power to bring into the very realities  of globalization, governance, flexibility and employability. Global space is represented as an entity, a place, 'the modern world' and it is a participant, rather than a circumstance. It is the passive subject and the logical object, which functions as an intermediate stretch of time which includes both pre and post-dates.

In Critical Discourse, interdiscursive analysis of texts is the mediating level of analysis, which is crucial in to integrating social and linguistic analysis. Under the manner of 'semiosis' social practices are networked so that to describe a particular social field. Social change is change in the networking and therefore, scalar changes in relations between global, regional, national and local  configurations, discourses and styles.

A language defines a certain potential, certain possibilities and at the same time excludes others. But texts as elements of social events are not simply the effects of potentials defined by languages. They exhibit intermediate organizational entities of a specifically linguistic sort; hence, they manifest the linguistic moments of networks of social practices like orders of discourse.

Read it Believe it!! Polysemy and Metonymy: The in-between point in conceptualizing discourse.

*Discourse refers to language produced by its users, interaction is implied and it further extends to cover longer stretches of language, rather than only sentences and utterances. This means that discourse is something broad and diverse as it is applied both to written and spoken language; thus, discourse explores who uses the language, to whom, why, when, where and how. (Sifianou, 2001:1-9)
                            

By ‘polysemy’ I mean:

a) ‘the phenomenon whereby a single vehicle has multiple related sense-units associated with it’ (Evans 2009: 149).

b) “the association of two or more related senses with a single linguistic form” (Taylor, 2003: 638).

c) not only a property of words but also a property of morphemes, morphosyntactic categories, and even syntactic constructions. (2003: 638).

 By ‘metonymy’ I mean the linguistic effect whereby a concept stands for something else; state of affairs/ situations/ events etc.

Both polysemy and metonymy are transformed into image schemas. An image schema is the combination of visualizing reality through the sensory system of seeing, hearing, feeling. However, it is more than the senses; it covers aspects of containing and verticality as well.

When we say that polysemy is a dynamic byproduct of this operation of conceptual integration, it is not a property of the words themselves. Polysemy is therefore ubiquitous but also barely noticeable in most cases.

When we speak of something in a metonymic manner we make our adaptation in virtue of a particular context. We coerce, modulate and select information so that to conceptualize the embedded message, either written, or spoken. As Cruse (2004: 118-20) claims Selection is observed when all the readings are suppressed except one. Then, this one reading will be “selected” and in this situation we cannot have more that one alternative. Coercion is expressed by the fact that we often try to convey an “intelligible message” through possible meaning extensions. In other words, if we find one meaning we consider it as the intended meaning so that to say that the context has “coerced a new meaning. Finally, modulation could be defined as a variation arising as a result of contextual effects which do not go beyond the bounds of a single sense. Hence, contextual modulation is divided into enrichment and impoverishment. Enrichment means to add information to the semantic context and make it more specific, whereas impoverishment could be viewed as the presence of “a lexical item [which] is being used in a vague sense”.

As humans we are predisposed to use language metonymic and denote meaning in a polysemic way. Both  polysemy and metonymy is dependent on higher pragmatic knowledge- knowledge of the world. In the later stages of acquisition the mind designates meaning in words by placing them into context. Theory of Mind is predisposed in humans and its processes such as contextualization are interrelated with encyclopedic knowledge and shared experience. 

"Sorry I'm not feeling myself today": The metaphor system in poetry

It has been observed that in persuasive language and by the term 'persuasive' encompassing genres such as politics, ads, literary texts and most of all poetry the metaphorical system is dominant.


In post-modern works; for instance in Oslon, Cage, Duncan, Bukowski, Owen, Palmer, Davidson, Bernstein, Pulmer, North, Trinidad and in many others the loss of self metaphor is juxtaposed and embedded. The self is regarded as the totality of facts and things. Facts refer to state of affairs, situations, experience and things to more objective entities such as the human body in itself (especially the female one). 


From a linguistic aspect- or to put it better from a more Cognitive view the metaphor lies on the embodiment condition. With respect to this, language shapes meaning and meaning shapes feelings and emotions. In virtue of emotive language the metaphor and especially the loss of self metaphor is used as the vehicle for expression. 


A person is presented as a dual entity.It is understood as a group of entities: the Subject & the Self. This distinction is applied on the basis of conceptualizing a holistic system of experiences (such as imagining ourselves as being someone else).—A person is the totality of Subject and Self. The experiencing consciousness is the Subject. The bodily and functional aspects constitute the Self due to a spatial relationship between Subject & Self. Hence,the metaphor is a way of conceptualizing a wide range of real experiences both positive & negative. The conceptualization of conscious control in terms of Self & Subject presupposes that the Subject possesses and controls the Self. If control is lost, possession is also lost.

Do we always speak of what we mean? Evidence from Reference

Do we always speak of what we mean? Do we always use reference in order to denote meaning and how can we really define its counterparts? Language can be ‘misleading’ in certain cases since not all referring expressions necessarily convey reference. Definite descriptions, deictics, generics, indexicals, proper names etc., should not be regarded as simple cases of referring expressions as their meaning goes beyond the utterance they occur. Their reference is shaped both by the intention of the speaker and the way the audience makes the identification with what is being referred. Non-referring is not restricted only to the attributive, or equative use of referring expressions. This paper will follow a more critical approach concerning (non)reference and examples will be drawn from newspaper articles, political speeches and advertisements; (non)reference will be considered as the interrelation of the situation derived from a particular context, on the basis of who, to whom, why, when, where and how norms of interaction, interpretation and genres are used.

References:

Bach, K. (1987): Thought and Reference. Oxford: Clarendon P.

Bloomaert, J. (2005): Discourse. New York: Cambridge UP.

Cruse, A. (2004): Meaning in Language, “Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics”. Series eds. Keith Brown,

Eve V. Clark, April Mc Mahon, Jim Miller & Lesley Milroy. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Donnellan, K. (1966): “Reference and Definite Descriptions”. Philosophical Review. 75: 281-304.

Eikmeyer, H. & Rieser, H. Ed. (1981): Meanings, Intentions and Stereotypes, “Words, Worlds and

Contexts.” Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. 133-150.

Kitis, E. (2009-10): “Semantics”. Thessaloniki: Aristotle UP.

Kitis, E. (MS): Deixis. Thessaloniki: Aristotle UP.

Kripke, S. (1972): “Naming and Necessity”. In Semantics for natural language, eds. Donald Davidson

and Gilbert Harman. Dordrecht: Reidel. 253-355 and 763-9.

Lyons, C. (1999): Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

The paper was presented in the 20th International Symposium of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

To my supervisors -professors for their guidance, my colleagues for the support  and most of all to despoina for her encouragement...

The Two Types of Modality: Agent-Oriented Vs. Epistemic Modality, A review on Heine's argument

Bernd Heine argues for the two types of modality, that is agent-oriented (also known as deontic root, objective, and pragmatic) and epistemic modality (also known as subjective, or hypothetical). Heine claims that epistemic modality is more subjective compared to agent-oriented modality, which is more objective; Thus, there are some modals, such as will,  that have closer relationship with the verb and some others, such as must, that do not have so close relationship with the verb of the sentence (19). As a result, will provokes agent-oriented modality (as it expresses objectivity), whereas must provokes epistemic modality (as it expresses subjectivity).

What factors affect modality?

The behavior of the modals in terms of agent-oriented and epistemic senses is affected by the type of the main verb of the clause; verbs expressing action and telic verbs provoke agent-oriented modality, but stative verbs provoke both types of modality (25). However, there are some other factors affecting modality, such as the type of proposition, tense, and aspect; in perfect, modals have agent oriented uses, and the same happens with interrogative and negative propositions (25).

Examples.

1. He had to come. (Agent-Oriented)
2. Does he need to come? (Agent-Oriented)
3. He must be coming. (Epistemic)
4. He must have come. (Epistemic)      

Contextual frames are associated with the two types of modality. “The notion of a contextual frame is similar to what others have called an ‘inferential schema,’ or simply a ‘frame,’ i.e. a body of knowledge evoked the language user in order to provide an inferential basis for the understanding of an utterance” (27-8). According to Heine, contextuality lies upon some factors such as contextual clues (focal frames which do not require mental effort or imagination, and non-focal frames which require objectivity), knowledge of the world (it provokes epistemic modality, as we can not change events or incidents) and social norms (for instance, when we believe in something socially acceptable, we can have either agent-oriented or epistemic sense, but when something is socially disapproved, only epistemic sense occurs) (28)

      Examples.

1. It must be three o’clock. (knowledge of the world, epistemic)
2. He has to be brave. (socially acceptable norm, agent-oriented)
3. He must be brave. (socially acceptable norm, epistemic)
4. He must be a coward. (socially unacceptable norm, epistemic)
5. He is said to beat his wife. (human agent as the subject, agent-oriented)    

Additionally, Heine argues for the issue of conceptual properties in relation to

the two kinds of modality. He takes into account the conceptual properties of force, controlling agent, dynamic event, time reference, and probability; all these factors provoke agent-oriented modality (29). Force, is provoked when a constituent is characterized by an “element of will” (Jespersen 1924: 320-1), that has an interest in an event either occurring or not (29). Dynamic events are observed when something manipulates a particular situation and provokes the change of a state (29).
       Examples

1. He has to come. (force)
2. I insist that he comes. (Controlling agent)

Heine’s “metaphor” and context model

In this part, I would like to mention that Heine, apart from the agent-oriented and epistemic modality, he also discusses the metaphor and context model. For instance, he takes the phrase be going to, and changes it from its concrete/ lexical meaning (the concrete meaning refers to the intention someone may have to go somewhere and  it indicates an action) to the grammatical meaning of the future tense (37). According to Heine, this transformation happens “from one domain of human conceptualization to another.” (37) In other words, he observes that the literal meaning of be going to (i.e. Sally is going to the town.) expresses some kind of motion in terms of space, and is a metaphor model; on the other hand the non-literal meaning of be going to (i.e. Sally is going to wake up in a minute.) is a context model as the literal meaning is ruled out.

       On the other hand, some linguists like Sweetser, suggest that “the conceptual shift from the agent-oriented to the epistemic domain is a clear instance of a metaphorical process.” (39) Coates, also observes that modal auxiliaries are transformed from agent-oriented to epistemic, due to the three types of intedeterminacy: gradience, ambiguity, and merger (39). However, Heine, Claudi and Hunnemeyer claim that both the metaphor and the context model are required for different levels; thus, the context model relates with the micro-level and the metaphor with the macro-level of the conceptual shift (40). Consequently, for be going to, the micro-level extension of the construction refers to its present uses and the cases of ambiguity between physical motion and intention; on the other hand, the macro-level is concerned with the shift from “a concrete source proposition to an abstract grammatical function.” (40-1)

In this part, I would like to point out that the theory concerning the discrimination between agent-oriented and epistemic Modality, is very useful for the theme of the research paper; which is the presence or absence of modality in conditionality, and especially in hypothesis. As we have mentioned before, modality is affected by many factors like the tense; for example according to Ritter epistemic modality is highly related with future tense and in its meaning it “entails that a temporal domain created by an FPS-form is a kind of intentional domain.” (136) Thus, we could easily agree with Declerck and Reed who claim that the future tense will cover not only the “pure future” sense but also “prediction” and “predictability.” (135)  As a result, epistemic modality exists in future tenses when something has its own set of presuppositions and truth conditions, and each of them can be evaluated and interpreted (136).

Examples with epistemic modalizers

1. If you asked him politely, he (may/ will) do it for you. (open-P)
2. If you had asked him politely, he (might/ would perhaps/ would certainly) had done it for you. (counterfactual)

Reference without Reference) Follow me in ISTAl for full discussion!!

Do we always speak of what we mean? How can we really define the counterparts of meaning? In a sentence like “Shakespeare is the author of Romeo and Juliet” the proper name Shakespeare is in predicate position as it identifies a quality or an activity of the entity and should not be simply regarded as an instance of direct reference. Language can be “misleading” in some cases, as not all referring expressions necessarily convey reference.