Recently there has been interest in examining how language is involved in the phenomenon of ‘manipulation’. This paper suggests that investigators, rather than treating ‘manipulation’ as an entity, should examine how communicators might engage in discursive acts of manipulating. To this end a distinction is made between manipulating information and manipulating people. Examples of both types, taken from the Portuguese Parliamentary Celebration of the April Revolution of 2004, are examined in depth to show how acts of manipulating can be performed (...) in different ways. By focussing on acts, we show that supposed ‘cognitive control’ over the audience's minds is not necessarily involved in manipulating; it is shown how investigators can provide evidence that manipulators act ‘knowingly’ when they mislead. We argue that the study of manipulating, and the distinction between manipulating information and people, provides a critical approach to the topic of political oratory. (shrink)

The paper focuses on metaphorical representation of military activities of the US-led international coalition and of ISIL which are construed on the basis of systematic metaphors drawn from the com...

This article assesses the role of fear and envy in the British broadsheets' construction of the 2008 Beijing Olympics by examining coverage of conflict in Tibet and the opening ceremony of the Games, and considering them in the light of the wider socio-economic context of the time. Drawing on elements of evolutionary psychology, combined with aspects of Systemic Functional Grammar as well as intertextuality, it demonstrates how China is presented as a war-mongering force and is thus an object of fear. (...) In addition, the analysis demonstrates how the opening ceremony is effectively ‘spoiled’ by negative appraisal, which is characteristic of envy. In evolutionary terms, envy and fear, in this case, emerge as useful emotions which effectively serve to ‘disarm’ China at a time when China is on the verge of becoming the world's next superpower and Britain finds itself in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Added to this, London 2012 was on the horizon. (shrink)

Packaging messages from different times and places, combining cognitive stimuli that would not otherwise be found together, journalists work discursively on various dimensions of distance to make the reality they construct and present more relevant and emotionally engaging for the audience. The present article makes a claim that such journalistic ‘work on distance’ and the resulting impression of ‘co-presence’ are central to the potential of television news discourse to affect cognitive–affective attitudes of the audience. The process of reducing the distance (...) is discussed under the term proximization and linked to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product. The data analysed come from the CNN news coverage of the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011. (shrink)

The British Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 represents one of the most pivotal periods in British industrial relations. The significance of media stance towards the miners remains a controversial issue today, as attested by recent publications looking back at the strike. Here, authors including miners, journalists and other commentators argue that media coverage of the strike followed a consistently anti-trade union agenda in which the media sought to destabilise the strike. An internal British Broadcasting Corporation report, only recently made public, shows (...) that the BBC themselves had concerns over possible imbalances in their coverage of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’. Despite the weight attached to media coverage in this context, however, surprisingly little research has been conducted from a discourse-analytical perspective to show systematically and empirically how such an agenda may have been manifested across media texts. In this article, drawing on Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies, I show how one particular metaphorical framing of the strike, which construed the strike as a war between the State and the National Union of Miners, persisted through the year-long period and consider the potential ideological functions of this framing in media strategies of legitimation. I show how this metaphor featured in linguistic, visual and multimodal forms of media representation. (shrink)

This article argues that errors in audio data processing should be examined to explore and expose the underlying components that enable linguistic communication and cross-cultural understanding. Examples of errors in the transcription of a Mexican social network’s conversations are analyzed to demonstrate the potential of such data in the development of sociocognitive language-processing theories. It is suggested that researchers working with audio-recorded data should expand the scope of what is considered useful data for the sake of both methodological reflexivity and (...) identifying the underlying cognitive processes enabling linguistic understanding. (shrink)