This article proposes an integrative approach to the analysis of political logos by combining relevance theory, speech act theory, the Gricean cooperative principle, and the grammar of visual design. The findings show that both the verbal and visual elements of a logo can be pragmatically interpreted through weak and strong implicatures, speech acts, and the flouting of conversational maxims, as they function as ostensive stimuli that prompt cognitive effort toward optimal relevance. When stimuli are incongruent, greater inferential effort is required to derive coherent meaning. The analysis identified multiple sources of incongruity both within and between modes: (a) mismatches between formal indicators of speech acts and their felicity conditions, often undermined by visual context or verbal vagueness; (b) discrepancies within the visual mode itself-between ideational, interactive, and compositional meanings-or between these visual layers and the verbal message; (c) conceptual inconsistencies between a slogan and the visual representation. These incongruities stimulate deeper cognitive processing but can hinder optimal relevance and increase the likelihood of unintended interpretations. Special attention is given to visual cues. At the ideational level, logos incorporate symbolic elements; the interactive level includes modality cues aligning with the sincerity condition of speech acts. Compositionally, the right part of the visual field signals new or rhematic information, affecting conceptual strength, while the upper part corresponds to "promise", reinforcing or weakening commissive illocutionary force. In sum, ambiguity or inconsistency in multimodal cues can compromise the communicative effectiveness of political logos by violating relevance-based expectations.
Natural translation or natural interpreting (NI) - performed by bilingual speakers without formal training - has received little attention in bilingualism studies, as it is often unfairly considered a byproduct of linguistic competence development (e.g., Harris, 1980a, largely dismissed it, regarding it as non-professional and rudimentary (see & Aacute;lvarez de la Fuente & Fern & aacute;ndez Fuertes, 2012a for a review). However, our paper presents a theoretical proposal that frames NI as a language-contact phenomenon playing an essential role not only in L1 bilingualism studies but also in those of L2 bilingualism. In fact, the way bilingual children acquire their two languages simultaneously in natural and family contexts has been recently drawn upon to offer a more accurate model for language production in fields such as language teaching (e.g., Davies, 2020). The authenticity of family interactions presented in such bilingual acquisition contexts seems to provide better insights for the study of both language acquisition and teaching because they reflect how language naturally evolves. Therefore, our goal is to highlight that L1 NI studies can be extended to an L2 context. In this spirit, we offer an analysis of L2 NI cases following the framework of L1 NI to showcase the universality of NI and its pervasiveness in language interactions, whether in L1 or L2, within family or school settings.
In most countries of the world, including Austria, people with diverse cultural backgrounds live and communicate in more than one language. Such individuals often identify with biculturalism or multiculturalism. The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of respondents originating from various countries of Europe and the USA living in Austria towards bilingualism, biculturalism, and individual identity. The central research question focuses on how the social environment influences the formation of identity among bilingual and multilingual individuals. To address this, the study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and ethnolinguistic observations to capture both statistical trends and in-depth personal narratives. These methods enabled the collection of data on language use in different social contexts, cultural practices, and perceptions of belonging. Findings indicate that multilingual speakers tend to adopt not only several languages but also multiple cultural affiliations and identities simultaneously, with their self-concept strongly shaped by everyday interactions in family, educational, and community environments.
In this paper I investigate the development of pill from a lexeme to a highly productive derivational affix. This productivity is manifested in the creation of numerous neologisms based on the constructional schema provided by stems combined by the newly-formed affix (redpill, bluepill, blackpill, pinkpill, dogpill, etc.). I focus on the semantic and functional development of pill in the online discourse of the members of the so-called manosphere as well as its gradual spread beyond these communities. I adopt the general theoretical framework of the usage-based approach to language change with special reference to the field of construction morphology. I apply the notion of constructionalization in order to place adequate focus on the semantic and functional aspects of change that the lexeme pill undergoes. Constructionalization bypasses the limitations and biases present in grammaticalization research and allows a focus on the more abrupt modifications in form and meaning that are taking place in limited pockets of language over relatively short timespans.
This article explores the strategies by which three world leaders induce people's cooperation in their COVID-19 addresses. The study examines how leaders exploit banal nationalism to evoke people's solidarity and cooperation. The data comprised three addresses delivered upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic by Queen Elizabeth, President Trump, and King Salman bin Abdul Aziz. The critical analysis revealed that the two Western leaders, Queen Elizabeth and President Trump, exploited nationalism to generate solidarity and elicit cooperation from their people, using some strategies that align with Billig's notion of banal nationalism and other strategies that go beyond banality. On the other hand, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, representing a non-Western approach in this study, avoided evoking nationalistic emotions and established a social, familial relationship with all groups of society. The study discusses how nationalistic strategies may have resulted in polarizing and excluding subgroups of society. The analysis also revealed that leaders may distance people instead of affiliating with them to construct a powerful image.
The sick can conceptualize their suffering individually and in a community by subordinating themselves to the rules of the discourse that regulates thinking and behaviour. Conceptualization can, therefore, be the result of choice, adopting a particular perspective, and filtering experience through categories that make up a specific ideological or axiological system. It is not only the result of somatic, cultural, or subcultural determination. Research conducted worldwide has already shown that conceptual metaphors help individual patients cope with suffering, mobilize them to fight, and even give them hope. Research on religious communities online has already mapped the community-forming potential of groups of the sick. However, so far, the two trends have not met. The authors of this article try to fill these gaps in the literature by using intuitive analysis of metaphors as part of the discourse analysis of the digital edition of the Polish monthly Apostolstwo Chorych [Apostolate of the Sick] in 2019-2022. The results of the analysis allow us to understand the community that creates the monthly magazine in its ideological and axiological dimensions. Moreover, the results help capture the connections between the conceptual processes of metaphorizing suffering and the community experience. The conducted research constitutes a contribution to further research on religious communities online, as well as on the metaphors, axiology, and pragmatics of discourses about illness, suffering, and death.
Apprehension predicates, such as the verbs fear and dread or the adjectives afraid and terrified, can combine with a number of complementation patterns, including to-infinitives, bare and prepositional gerunds, as well as finite clauses. In many cases there is no immediately apparent difference in function between the alternative constructions. However, they are characterized by their own sets of collocations, syntactic idiosyncrasies and specific pragmatic functions, which suggests that the complement choice is conditioned by a number of probabilistic factors. The aim of this study is to investigate selected variables affecting the choice of the non-finite complements of the verbs fear and dread, namely the to-infinitive and the gerund. Logistic regression is applied to data from the COCA corpus in order to establish the relative importance and statistical significance of a range of factors, from strictly syntactic constraints, including the horror aequi principle and extraction, through semantic aspects such as agentivity, to pragmatics, specifically the contextual inferences associated with the constructions. The study investigates if the choice of non-finite complement constructions with both fear and dread is affected by the same set of factors, or whether there is a specific type of motivation-semantic, syntactic, lexical, or pragmatic-that prevails in the case of each of the two analysed verbs.
Research into event and argument structure within Distributed Morphology has been centred on the assumption that the vP head is present in the structure of only those lexically deverbal words that behave eventively in terms of their external syntax (that is, they can license modifiers that describe the event of the underlying verb). The vP layer has been claimed to perform two main roles, namely serving as the locus of event implications and categorizing the structure syntactically as a verb. This paper, using evidence from root-derived-ble adjectives in English (e.g., applicable, perceptible, visible), argues that these two functions are fulfilled by two different functional heads. Specifically, it is shown that root-derived-ble adjectives can undergo event-related modification and thus be derived by a suffix that selects for an eventive functional head. Their structure nevertheless does not include the cyclic vP projection, present only in -ble adjectives derived from verbs as well as truncated roots (e.g., operable, tolerable, calculable).
The present paper explores how native and non-native speakers evaluate (im)politeness in intercultural requests in the Myanmar language (also known as Burmese) from the perspective of the speaker. It is aimed to investigate how (im)politeness is processed in making requests in intercultural communication between native and non-native speakers of the Myanmar language, not only from the point of speakers in the conversations but also from the point of native and non-native speakers of the Myanmar language. Since this study focuses on intercultural communication, the target participants are native and non-native speakers of the Myanmar language. Two different groups of participants responded to the questionnaire including eight intercultural requests from the speaker's perspective. Using the data obtained from 40 participants (20 from each group), the data analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. As a pilot study, the validity and reliability scores of the questionnaire were also explored. A group of experts from Myanmar acted as the panel for testing content validity and approved the validity of the questionnaire. For the reliability, 0.806 Cronback's alpha score was obtained. As for the main finding, the difference between native and non-native speakers' perceptions of (im)politeness towards every intercultural request can be seen clearly, highlighting the role of culture in (im)politeness processing. Moreover, perceptions of (im)politeness do not reveal a common pattern even in the same group of informants (native speakers or non-native speakers). The most striking fact is that (im)politeness evaluation is not related to the contextual factors in intercultural communication.
This article presents a case study of COVID-related terms in popular science articles. It is a corpus-based analysis of articles published in Scientific American and translated into Polish. Its aim is to observe COVID-related terminology variation in translated popular science texts. The bilingual corpus used in this study comprises 51 pairs of texts published in 2020, 2021, and 2022 in Scientific American and translated into Polish and then published in & Sacute;wiat Nauki. The design for this study included corpus creation and compilation, automated term extraction, exploration of the corpus for relevant contexts, equivalent terms and variants (concordance, parallel concordance). The findings confirm variation in medical terminology in popularizations, possibly motivated by language structure and the need for clarity in popular science communication. The study revealed denominative, conceptual and linguistic variants. The most prominent variation concerned the term COVID.
