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)

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)

Textual representation of graphene in Sweden’s most circulated newspapers is analyzed in 229 articles from 2004 to 2018. What is and is not said about graphene is explored through systematically identifying the lexical and grammatical patterns of sentences using the word “graphene.” Graphene is said to be a super material with certain properties, to be an object of research, commercialization, and application, and to have societal significance. Given frequent classifications of graphene as a nanomaterial in scientific discourse, there is notably (...) limited reference to graphene as “nano” in the newspapers and only marginal reference to risk. This paper discusses the findings regarding this Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene in relation to its intertextuality, i.e., how texts draw upon and recontextualize other texts: the Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene echoes discourses of promise formulated elsewhere in society; it is not very diversified in terms of themes; it is dominated by positive and neutral representations rather than by risk; and it makes limited reference to the nano-discourse, even though, according to most definitions, graphene is a nanomaterial. (shrink)

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)

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 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)