Search results

Abstract
This paper on rhythm is an adaptation of the semiotic research on rhythm in versified language presented as one of the seven types of poetic iconicity in Chapter 5 of The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction (L. Brandt 2013) entitled "Effects of poetic enunciation: Seven types of iconicity". Defined by the linebreak, poetic language use engenders distinctive interpretive affordances, some of which manifest themselves as emphatically iconic sign relations contributing to the expressive whole of a text. In "Effects of poetic enunciation", I explore syntactic, semantic, phonetic, rhythmic and rhetorical aspects of the phenomenon of semiotic iconicity, and its counterpart aniconicity, in language characterized by an intentionally (line)broken syntax and contribute a systematic account of the different types of semiotic iconicity relations, understood as figural or diagrammatic similarity relations – or, conversely, potent dissimilarity relations, i.e. aniconicity – between expressive means and semantic content. Rhythmic iconicity is the fifth type of iconicity in this typology.

Abstract
The paper examines imagined dialogue, aka fictive (verbal) interaction, in the strategically motivated discourse of advertising campaigns, i. e., discourse designed for the specific purpose of promoting a particular agenda or commercial product. The paper furthermore explores the grammatical aspect of the examined direct-speech metonymies. Though excluded so far from the grammars of Germanic languages, embedded utterances may in fact function as heads or modifiers in syntactic phrases and as sentence functions (e. g., direct object, verb). The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate how embedded utterances function linguistically as well as rhetorically in the discourse of marketing – a particularly high-stakes genre of professional communication – and to stipulate hypotheses concerning strategic motivations for this employment of non-quotational direct speech.

Abstract
On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the first cognitive-semantic theory of metaphor - Metaphors
We Live By (1980) - this paper presents a communication-oriented perspective on the practice of metaphor analysis. Through discussion of contemporary metaphor theories, it identifies a number of unresolved issues. Among these are the notions of domains, mental spaces and binding, the unidirectionality hypothesis, the emergence problem, the significance of pragmatic context, and the philosophical status of representations. The theories discussed are conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual integration theory, the neural theory of language, the attribution model of metaphor, semiotic integration theory, and relevance theoretic approaches to metaphor including the hybrid theory of metaphor. Comparing analyses and explanatory frameworks, the paper offers a theoretical and methodological critique of these approaches - as food for thought and fuel for prospective future research projects in cognitive linguistics and beyond.