Following recent demands in the fields of cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, both individually and in a collective approach, this volume gathers different works focused on the interaction between discourse, cognition, and society. Romano and Porto’s volume starts from the premises which take a common approach to language (language-in-use), viewing it as a changing and dynamic process of interaction in real discourse. They advocate for a change in the trends of cognitive linguistics in favour of studies which are empirically and statistically supported. All the chapters included in this volume study discourse strategies from a socio-cognitive perspective in very different scopes, applying and combining several theories and approaches shedding light onto this new trend or somehow different approach to socio-cognitivism and discourse.
The volume is divided into three sections, each one with a different, yet sometimes overlapping, focus of research. The first three chapters, written by Enrique Bernárdez, Eline Zenner et al., and Augusto Soares da Silva, focus on real case-studies in context, emphasizing the necessity of a situated analysis of discourse. The second part contains three chapters as well, by Clara Molina and Isabel Alonso, Laura Hidalgo-Downing, Monica Kraljevic and Ma Ángeles Martínez, and Malgorzata Fabiszak, respectively. They all share a focus on multimodal language on different typologies of discourse, these being digital stories, TV commercials, and architectural memorials. Last but not least, the third part of the volume includes four chapters, by Ana Roldán-Riejos, Mercedes Díez Prados, Jane Lugea, and Ana Laura Rodríguez Redondo, who carried out cross-linguistic studies, contrasting discourse in two languages (English and Spanish). The data they chose for the analyses come from different types of discourse, namely oral narratives, political debates, and technical texts; metaphor is the focus of the first two, and narrative structures of the two remaining chapters. Each of the three sections will be commented on in turn for the purpose of this review.
Socio-cognitive approach to discourse. “This surgeon is a butcher!” is the aim of the study by Bernárdez, who takes this commonly repeated metaphoric expression as an example to prove that there are flaws in traditional, isolating methods of metaphor studies. He departs from two studies which analysed this metaphoric expression previously, and comments on their arguable drawbacks to support his claim. These two studies take different approaches when studying the same expression, yet share some aspects. In Grady, Oakley, and Coulson’s (Reference Grady, Oakley, Coulson, Steen and Gibbs1999) work, they studied the expression from the mainstream and most frequent method used in metaphor and blends studies; however, as Bernárdez claims, they fail to point at the different meanings of the two isolated words they analyse (surgeon and butcher). For their part, Brandt and Brandt (2005) observe the expression from a semiotic perspective, but they do take the interactive nature of the same into account, considering that the language used is embedded in a situation, an approach that is recently taken but which has not been the case in previous metaphor and blend studies. By summarizing the use of the expression over the last centuries in Western cultures, Bernárdez defends the idea that this metaphor, as many others, is frozen, and therefore any claim of novelty is a flaw in previous studies. On the contrary, he suggests that comparing it to other non-Western cultures and languages could be a new, interesting approach, and this would avoid wrong assumptions of universality. In an attempt to solve what he considers existing mistakes in Cognitive Linguistics, he provides a list of potential solutions to them. In sum, he claims that there is an urgent need to consider language as part of interaction and culture itself, not as an isolated part, referring to Santos’s (2010) notion of abyssal thinking and to previous, yet unacknowledged studies that have proved the interactive, non-solipsistic and embedded nature of language.
A more embedded, realistic use of language is approached by Zenner et al. in their study, in which they make a bottom-up analysis of real language used by participants during the TV programme Expedite Robinson. They focus on individual differences in the use of languages and on intra-speaker variation in terms of use of two different features of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD). As with Bernárdez, they also point at several flaws in traditional studies within the branch of Sociolinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, and refer to what they call a ‘third wave sociolinguistics’, which presents a change in methodology, advocating for an invaluable role of quantitative analyses in the field. Since the focus of the study are two features of CBD, which may be completely unknown for most readers, they provide an extensive explanation of such features that help the reader to follow the rest of the methodology taken. In line with their defence of a more prominent role of quantitative analyses, they use Cramer’s V statistic method to measure to what extent and why participants adapted their use of CBD in different discursive situations. Another factor they considered after analysing individual features of speech was whether style-shifts occurred strategically or not. Their study concludes that social identity, linguistic markers, and strategic movements do intertwine.
Finally, Soares da Silva presents a corpus-based and critical discourse-based analysis of metaphors found in the Portuguese press in two different time periods, June–July 2011 and May 2013. These periods belong to the years of economic recession that Portugal suffered and the entry of the Troika. He focuses on the persuasive power of the metaphors used in the newspaper Público. One of the highlights of his study is the very structured and justified method he employs, and a clear framing within Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are also presented; first, the quantitative corpus-based analysis is performed using Stefanowitsch’s (2006) target domain metaphor, and the qualitative study divides all the metaphorical expressions according to three well-stablished categories of metaphors: the Great Chain of Being (Lakoff & Turner, Reference Lakoff and Turner1989), the Image Schema (Johnson, Reference Johnson1987), and Actions are Events. Da Silva provides an extensive list of examples from the corpus, which facilitates the comprehension of such a classification for the reader. Another aspect analysed is the positive or negative use of the metaphors; Cramer’s V measure is used to test whether there is a correlation between the polarity of the metaphors and the date of publication of the articles. Finally, three sociocultural factors are considered, making this study one more proof justifying a natural link between discursive functions and bodily or embedded experiences. Embodiment and emotion, ideology, and morality are the three embodied motivations apparently hidden in the metaphors used in the corpus and, as seems to be suggested, in political and/or economic discourse. In sum, Soares da Silva presents a real-case, contextualized, and detailed study of conceptual metaphors which also emphasizes the fundamental role played by situatedness in discourse and mind.
Discourse strategies in multimodal communication. The second part of this volume is made up of three chapters as well, all of them discussing discourse strategies from a multimodal perspective. Molina and Alonso-Belmonte study meaning-making processes in digital story-telling from a functional-cognitive perspective. This mixed study presents several strategies, such as the focus on real cases with real participants in the meaning-construction process. The study is quite complex since, within the cognitive approach, they apply the theories of Mental Spaces and Conceptual Integration to discourse (Fauconnier & Turner, Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002; Oakley & Hougaard, 2008). The data under study is the digital story To Every Child, in which the narrator is a black woman telling of the hardships of becoming a teacher in Boston, and encouraging young people to follow her example. The story is a reliable source of study for multimodal approaches as it combines images, text, sounds, and even colour. As the study argues, it is the combination of at least two of these elements that creates the meaning in the story, both at a micro (within each slide) and at a macro (between slides) level. The authors also provide the readers with several complex yet very functional examples of blends found in the story at both levels. Another meaning-making strategy found is the use of multimodal metaphors, extended from slide to slide, helping to link slides and the meaning in them as the story goes on. Finally, the authors make a strong claim supporting the relation and similarity between functional and cognitive studies; according to them, it is only by using an eclectic approach that real discourse, as complex as it is, can be fully and reliably analysed.
Hidalgo-Downing et al. perform a study of multimodal metaphors in TV advertisements, observing creativity and narrativity in their corpus through extended metaphors and through two different narrative techniques. They base their study on Sternberg’s (1999) definition of creativity, defined as the “ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate”. The data under analysis in this multimodal study are composed of twenty-one cosmetics advertisements broadcast on British TV on 19 March 2009; the two narrative techniques are (i) when the story ending coincides with narrative ending; and (ii) when the story ending coincides with the story beginning. Multimodal metaphors play a crucial role in the study, and the authors focus on three main dimensions concerning multimodality: visual, aural, and musical features are individually but eclectically analysed to observe their effects on the advertisements and the audience. Concerning the multisemiotic nature of the study, it is divided into Vectors, namely Goals and Actor/Actress. Finally, another aim of study is the potential recurrence of two conceptual metaphors: LIGHT IS GOOD and HARMONIOUS MUSIC IS GOOD. Once the results are summarized and explained, four of the advertisements serve as examples of the two narrative lines mentioned. The study concludes that the cosmetics advertisements seem to present a hidden manipulative persuasive intention, shown in a combined way by multimodal metaphors and happy-ending beginnings; moreover, the two metaphors they intended to observe appear in an extended form in all the advertisements, which seems to highlight the positive aspects of the products, i.e., another manipulative persuasive tool.
The last chapter of the second part shows a less vivid and colourful study of multimodality in the real world. Fabiszak observes multimodal elements, mainly the visual and the verbal layers, of four memorials of former extermination sites in Poland; two of them date from the 1960s and the other two from the 2000s. This study combines image schemata and metaphoric and metonymic extension theories with Critical Discourse Analysis. The term ‘collective memory’ is explained (Halbwachs, Reference Halbwachs1980) as the memory of a group, which makes it intrinsically a social practice and, therefore, in a dialectic relationship with discourse. The author intends to observe the interaction of the visual and the verbal layers in the memorials separated in two different time periods. The study is complex, since not only verbal and visual elements are analysed; she also focuses her attention on details of the memorials, such as the gates, the walks, the constricted spaces, the weight of the elements, the tall shafts, the shade and coldness of the sites, the materials used for their construction, the human remains, and even keys. All these elements together form the landscape and the visual layer of the memorials and are a representation of conceptual metaphors that make the visitor feel the same way prisoners felt. Some of the metaphors found are the Path and the Container (gates, walks, and walls) and the image schema of Movement. This layer, combined with the verbal one, makes the visit an embodied experience in which there is an interaction between the visitor and the elements in the memorial. The author claims that all this together constructs the meaning of the memorials and help the visitors to understand the commemorative discourse strategies used in these sites.
Cross-linguistic (English–Spanish) perspectives. The last part of the book comprises four chapters which compare their results in English and Spanish, but in different scopes or types of discourse. First, Roldán-Riejos analyses civil engineering (CE) zoomorphic metaphors from a socio-cognitive and multimodal approach. She uses the term ‘discourse metaphors’ for the first time in this volume (originally applied by Zinken, Hellsten, and Nerlich, Reference Zinken, Hellsten, Nerlich, Dirven, Frank and Bernardez2008), which is a very appropriate concept as it refers to those metaphors that are “culturally situated and function as a framing device within a specific discourse community” (this volume, p. 188). She identifies a set of CE elements in both languages and contrasts them to observe potential similarities and differences. After providing the reader with an extensive list of illustrated examples, she concludes that most of the correspondences found in the corpus differ between the languages as, while English tends to use animals as sources, Spanish uses animal parts; moreover, she strongly defends the important role played by metonymic mappings as they are active in both languages, and also the relevance of the multimodal approach. The differences found between the languages support previous claims of the bodily and culturally dependent frames that discourse has.
Díez-Prados studies the language used by two Spanish politicians in a pre-electoral debate (2011) and compares it to a similar event in the pre-electoral period in America (2008). She finds that the use of certain metaphors does not vary depending on the ideology of the party, but on whether the party in question is the government in power or the opposition. Also, both languages present similarities in terms of the most generic metaphors (namely, the nurturant parent or the strict parent) and in the targets of the discourse (economy, governing, and politics), but they differ in more specific, culturally dependent ones. To analyse the metaphors in the corpus they applied the MIP method (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and, consequently, to evaluate the metaphors found and used by both Spanish candidates (Rajoy and Rubalcaba), they used Hunston’s (2000) evaluation model and Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory. In sum, in both languages we observe that the candidates use metaphors as an evaluative tool to defend their position, attack their opponent, and therefore win votes; in other words, instead of being shaped by ideology, metaphors are used as voter-catching devices.
Text World Theory (Werth, Reference Werth1999; Gavins, Reference Gavins2007) is the cognitive model on which Lugea bases her study of narrative strategy building in Spanish and English. This model was first designed to be applied in individual texts in English, but this chapter aims to prove that it can also be used to perform a cross-linguistic study of multiple texts or discourse types. She focuses on how twenty-four speakers of each language (Peninsular and Mexican Spanish and British and American English) construct the narrative story when they are shown and asked to tell aloud a wordless picture book story (known as the ‘frog story’ method; Bamberg Reference Bamberg1985). More specifically, she observes their temporal world-building strategies; for this aim, she applies qualitative and quantitative analyses to empirically support her study, and, to make it more reliable, she uses two different types of transcription, one for each analysis. The study concludes that the languages differ in their use of temporal tenses and that they may have a preference in accessibility relations between the discourse and the text-world. Thus, it argues that further studies applying Text World Theory in other languages would shed more light and expand its applications and outcomes.
The last chapter, by Rodríguez Redondo, analyses gesture structuring strategies in autobiographical narratives, also contrasting Spanish and English data. Her study is based on recent perspectives on the conceptual segmentation of oral emotional narratives (Romano & Porto, 2010; Romano, Porto, & Molina, Reference Romano, Porto and Molina2013), and the development of cognitive gesture studies (McNeill, Reference McNeill1992, among others). However, her main purpose is to obtain upgraded tools focusing on gestures as meaning-making helpers through a given discourse. More concretely, she analyses two oral narratives in which the speakers tell something related to a trip they made in the past and which is supposed to stay in the collective memory. In a fragmented oral narrative, there are different strategies the narrator uses in a more or less voluntary way, which serve as space builders or narrative anchors, and gestures can serve as both, according to this study. After analysing each of the speakers in detail, observing each gesture in each fragment of the story, the study shows that different strategies are used in the two languages as the Spanish speaker uses gestures mainly as discourse markers and the English speaker as attentional markers. However, she argues, more extensive data is needed in order to make general assumptions concerning gestures as structuring strategies.
In conclusion, this volume gathers ten chapters which apply very different yet convergent methods to study discourse strategies and meaning-making strategies in different socially triggered situations and scopes. By providing authentic data and performing not only qualitative, as traditional approaches used to do, but also quantitative analyses, they collectively prove that further eclectic studies need to be empirically and statistically supported. As a whole, the book covers a wide range of methods which are in some way innovative in Social and Cognitive Interaction Studies, being of interest not only for students and future scholars but also for researchers working in this field.
