Cognitive Linguistics Research Articles

COVID-19 Vaccine Framing: The Case of Astrazenca and Twitter Users

Framing of health messages on social media can impact health choices and behaviour such as vaccine uptake. The present study aimed to examine how AstraZeneca has been framed on social media, characterize Twitter users who have engaged in the distribution of health-related information about the AstraZeneca vaccine, and demonstrate the impact of various frames on user engagement. Tweets with a collective total of more than 159,000 words were gathered from tweets posted during the second and third week of March 2021 and analyzed using a cognitive linguistics approach, i.e., frame semantics. In addition, social media mining tools were employed to investigate user engagement. The findings indicate the presence of negative vaccination framing with three sub-systems: the vaccine (i.e., vaccination politics), the government’s response to (in)effectiveness, and citizens (the vaccinated), which are known through public reaction. All frames represented AstraZeneca in a negative light and have implications for health professionals, policies, and practices. Furthermore, Twitter user analysis revealed a link between the condensed nature of the retweets about the AstraZeneca vaccine and the potential spread of health misinformation. The findings inform future research by providing a snapshot of how the public has dealt with recent news of the reported side effects of the AstraZeneca vaccine on social media. The study concludes that the findings provide useful information in understanding the impact of health messages on social media in influencing people’s vaccine uptake.

Rock is Dead, Long Live Rock

Kilmartin Glen’s rock art and built structures suggest activities dedicated to decentring human individuality and agency, paradoxically through heightened sensory experience. This process of “losing oneself” in time and place may be understood in terms of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), rejecting subject–object relationships in favour of a “flat ontology” of object–object relations in which life or sentience receives no privileged status. OOO’s explication of metaphor, rooted in a schema of essence and appearance, and further supported by cognitive linguistics, serves as a basis for erasing not only the distinction between the literal and metaphorical but also, with additional consideration of the implicate order as described by physicist David Bohm, the organic and inorganic. Taken together, these approaches allow us to understand ritual activity involving music and contact with “dead” stone at astronomically significant moments as a method of “attunement” to the continuity between terrestrial/celestial and animate/inanimate, consistent with contemporary efforts to reconcile classical and quantum physics as it confronts the subjunctive nature of reality itself.

Bezkresna przestrzeń na kartce papieru

The paper attempts to introduce Polish readers to a theory presented by the American literary scholar Margaret Freeman in her recent book, The Poem as Icon (2020). In the monograph, Freeman analyzes ways in which the reader experiences reality – both visible and invisible – through poetry. Her fundamental assumption is that the relevant research question is not what literary art is, but how it comes to be what it is. The purpose of the present paper is to show that, although written by a literary scholar, the monograph corresponds to general tendencies that can be seen in contemporary humanities: in cognitive linguistics (in particular, Leonard Talmy’s theory of -ception and George Lakoff’s cognitive theory of metaphor), in the theory of linguistic picture of the world, or in discourse analysis. All these disciplines are based upon the assumption that the essence of the world is continuous change, and they investigate linguistic expressions in the process of becoming, which is relative to factors traditionally considered as non-linguistic. Freeman’s poetic cognition has a wide scope: it embraces cognitive processes of human mind, but also bodily and emotive cognition. Thus poetic cognition is embodied, and in Freemen’s theory a “poem-as-icon” ultimately becomes an illusion of the “here-and-now” direst experience.

Chart Image from Observatory in School Cognitive Linguistic

Chart Image from Observatory in School Cognitive Linguistic

When Modality and Tense Meet. The Future Marker budet ‘will’ in Impersonal Constructions with the Modal Adverb možno ‘be possible’

ABSTRACT This paper examines Russian impersonal constructions with the modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ with and without the future copula budet ‘will be,’ i.e., možno + budet + inf and možno + inf. My contribution can be summarized as follows. First, corpus-based evidence reveals that možno + inf constructions are vastly more frequent than constructions with copula. Second, the meaning of constructions without the future copula is more flexible: while the possibility is typically located in the present, the situation denoted by the infinitive may be located in the present or the future. Third, I show that the možno + inf construction is more ambiguous and can denote present, gnomic or future situations. Fourth, I identify a number of contextual factors that unambiguously locate the situation in the future. I demonstrate that such factors are more frequently used with the future copula, and thus motivate the choice between the two constructions. Finally, I illustrate the interpretations in a straightforward manner by means of schemas of the type used in cognitive linguistics.

Building bridges between conceptual metaphor theory, L2 speakers’ perception, and pedagogical practice

ABSTRACT Within Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) has focused on conceptual representation and has been applied to the study of emotion since the 1980s. Since the study of language is a powerful asset for understanding how speakers conceptualize emotions, examining frequent yet difficult linguistic constructions to express one’s emotions in the L2 seems, therefore, a relevant task, especially for the L2 teaching-learning process. By looking at the description of the semantic relation between the literal and figurative meaning of the Spanish change-of-state construction ‘ponerse + adjective’, the present study aims to offer a CMT-based analysis of two rather neglected metaphors in the CMT literature: EMOTIONS ARE CLOTHES and A SPONTANEOUS AND TEMPORARY CHANGE OF STATE IS A SPONTANEOUS AND TEMPORARY CHANGE OF LOCATION. Along with the CMT analysis, empirical data seeking evidence of the psychological reality of metaphorical thoughts were collected from two surveys. Participants were 36 intermediate Spanish/L2 students from a US-based college. In light of our findings, we designed a cognitive linguistics-informed pedagogical proposal that has been implemented in a follow-up study. This research corroborates the idea that building bridges between theoretical and applied disciplines is paramount for investigations in both fields to evolve.

METAPHORICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CONCEPT CONFLICT IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE (BASED ON IMAGE METAPHORS)

The article is devoted to the metaphorical representation of the concept CONFLICT in the English-language political discourse, namely American and British. The figurative content of the concept CONFLICT is realized through a metaphorical image, which clarifies the essence of the CONFLICT more profoundly by means of its figurative assimilation to other entities in the context of modern English-language political discourse. Metaphorical images are revealed on the basis of the cognitive-discursive interpretation of the discursive contexts of the metaphorical nomination with the involvement of the tools of the cognitive metaphor theory. The article defines the notion of conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics, explains the definition of image metaphor and establishes the specifics of the metaphorical actualization of the concept CONFLICT in modern political discourse by representatives of American and British culture. The analysis of the speeches of English-speaking political leaders between 2000-2020 showed that CONFLICT is represented by the following image metaphors: CONFLICT is ideological STRUGGLE, CONFLICT is LAST RESORT, CONFLICT is TEST, CONFLICT is CONTEST, CONFLICT is METAPHOR, CONFLICT is CLASH, CONFLICT is MISTAKE, CONFLICT is SPORT, CONFLICT is EXPERIENCE, CONFLICT is CALLING, CONFLICT is BIG MATTER, CONFLICT is DIFFICULT PROPOSITION, CONFLICT is BIG CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE, CONFLICT is AN INTERESTING WAY TO DESCRIBE THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, CONFLICT is COMPLEX MISSION, CONFLICT is IMAGE, CONFLICT is ENFORCING DOCTRINE, CONFLICT is TRAGEDY, CONFLICT is RESPONSIBILITY, CONFLICT is NOT OPTIMISTIC THOUGHT, CONFLICT is SUBJECT, CONFLICT is DAMAGE, CONFLICT is DISASTER, CONFLICT is BLOODY AND BRUTAL BUSINESS, CONFLICT is MEASUREMENT, CONFLICT is BOND, CONFLICT is PARALLEL, CONFLICT is VICTORY, CONFLICT is primarily intelligence and law enforcement operation,CONFLICT is SCAR, CONFLICT is DISEASE, CONFLICT is LOSER, CONFLICT is REALM OF UNCERTAINTY, CONFLICT is CREATION, CONFLICT is PLEDGE, CONFLICT is RELICS, CONFLICT is EXPRESSION OF HUMAN FOLLY, CONFLICT is CHAPTER OF HISTORY, CONFLICT is DISTANT MEMORY, CONFLICT is REMORSELESS SCAVENGER, CONFLICT is SURPASSING IRONY, CONFLICT is (not) WORD, CONFLICT is (not) CRUSADE, CONFLICT is UNJUSTIFIED PROVOCATION, CONFLICT is WORST POSSIBLE SOLUTION, CONFLICT is TASK, CONFLICT is MORAL, CONFLICT is OPTION, CONFLICT is ANSWER, CONFLICT is FESTING WOUND. Image metaphors depict the CONFLICT in the most unusual comparisons and similes, which are actualized both by political representatives of American and British society.

An Analysis of Cognitive Linguistics Applied Strategies in English Vocabulary Teaching

This paper aims to analyze the application strategies of Cognitive Linguistics in English vocabulary teaching. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cognitive Linguistics emerged as a prominent theoretical framework, providing new theoretical support for English teaching. This paper first introduces the basic concepts and principles of Cognitive Linguistics. Then, it discusses how Cognitive Linguistics can be applied to promote vocabulary acquisition, including the use of prototype, conceptual metaphor and image schema. Based on the literature review and analysis, this paper further examines the significance of context and collocation in vocabulary learning. Finally, it summarizes the advantages and challenges of the application of Cognitive Linguistics in English vocabulary teaching. This paper highlights the significant role of Cognitive Linguistics in vocabulary teaching and provides new insights and methods for future English teaching.

Review: Cognitive Linguistics: Textbook for Universities / S.M. Kolesnikova, E.V. Altabaeva, A.T. Gryaznova; ed. by S.M. Kolesnikova. — Moscow: Yurite, 2022–2023. — 192 p

Modern cognitive linguistics is becoming a basic philological discipline, allowing students to understand the relationship between language and human thinking, to explain the linguistic picture of the world and its role in the formation of social consciousness. The new generation textbook “Cognitive Linguistics” edited by S.M. Kolesnikova reveals the most important concepts and terms of cognitive linguistics and shows the algorithms of analyzing the conceptosphere and its interpretation. The textbook consists of three thematic parts, consistently revealing the theoretical material, giving an idea of the basic directions of cognitive linguistics and algorithms of analyzing the concepts of natural language and artistic discourse. In addition to the theory of the issue, the textbook contains extensive reference material and bibliography, which helps undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students in writing research papers.

NAMES OF PETS IN PAREMIA - NATIONAL CODE

In the article paremia is analyzed and considered as an important source of folk knowledge in agriculture and meteorology. The purpose of the article is to show the features of the proverb containing the names of domestic animals, and thereby determine the knowledge of the people in creating a linguistic picture of the world, to open the national code based on this information. Research work was carried out in the lexico-semantic, cognitive direction. The author considers paroemia, containing the names of domestic animals, as a special linguocultural unit that is passed down from generation to generation and forms the linguistic picture of the world of the Kazakh society. During the study, special attention was paid to proverbs containing the names of domestic animals, as an important unit in determining national identity based on social conditions and cultural code. In disclosing information on the historical experience of the people in proverbs, special importance is attached to the cognitive function as national knowledge, social code, cultural code. At the same time, statistical information is provided on the use of collective names and individual names of domestic animals in the composition of proverbs and sayings. The pragmatic potential of the names of domestic animals in the composition of proverbs and sayings is analyzed, their place is determined as a means of transferring in the perception of the world, the knowledge accumulated by people over the centuries. It is argued that proverbs, which include the names of domestic animals, are the main linguocultural units that form the knowledge base of the nation and carry cultural information, and the cultural codes behind the implicit information in them are revealed. The conclusions drawn are substantiated by cognitive, statistical, comparative and descriptive methods and are proved by specific examples. Quotes are taken from proverbs. The practical significance of the article lies in the fact that its main results can be used in theoretical courses such as lexicology, cognitive linguistics, linguoculturology, as well as in seminars on the practice of teaching the Kazakh language.

REPRESENTATION OF CONCEPTUAL OPPOSITION IN A PERSONALIZED MODEL OF LANGUAGE PERSONALITY (BY THE EXAMPLE OF THE CREATION ‒ DESTRUCTION DICHOTOMY)

REPRESENTATION OF CONCEPTUAL OPPOSITION IN A PERSONALIZED MODEL OF LANGUAGE PERSONALITY (BY THE EXAMPLE OF THE CREATION ‒ DESTRUCTION DICHOTOMY)

An Analysis of the Images in Hayao Miyazaki’s Movies from the Perspective of Cognitive Metaphor

Hayao Miyazaki’s (born on January 5, 1941 in Tokyo), is a Japanese animator, animation producer, cartoonist, animation director, and animation screenwriter. His movies have lasting impact. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics, this study analyzes the multi-modal metaphors in his animated movies to explore his cognitive needs behind his creation and find out how these metaphors are generated. This paper uses the method of qualitative analysis and comprehensively analyzes the images, aiming to answer two questions: 1) What are the multi-modal metaphors in his animated movies? 2) What cognitive needs and creative motivations do these multi-modal metaphors reflect in his movies? 
 
 In this paper, five of Miyazaki’s animated movies are employed to analyze the images in it. The secondary data was collected from the website of movies. The results of the study showed that there is a large number of non-textual metaphors in his movies, such as: Pig, Totoro, Oil house, Chihiro, Animals, Fire, Bridge, Tain, and so on. These multimodal metaphors reflect the cognitive needs and psychological motivations behind his creations. Through the analysis of Hayao Miyazaki himself, basic color, emotions, space, daily habits, national culture and other metaphorical cognition in his movies, we have a full understanding of metaphorical cognition, language and culture, national psychology and thinking habits in the process of his creation. The findings are of great importance to the cognitive study of metaphors in the field of animated movies.

Parallax in translation of ekphrastic poetry (case study of Wystan Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’)

The article focuses on the cognitive underpinnings and typology of translation transformations that they deploy in translating ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrasis is viewed as a rhetoric means of verbal rendering a non-verbal object, e.g. a picture or a painting. The article is a case study of Wistan Hugh Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts and its Ukrainian translation. It renders several paintings of Old Holland Masters that feature the world’s indifference to people’s sufferings and other strong emotions. Theoretically, besides the area of cognitive linguistics, the study departs from the narrative theory that makes a special emphasis of the subjective nature of the narrative. Narrative subjectivity in translation accounts for the immediate semantic relations between the subject-author (the author of the original) and the subject-translator (the author of the translation). These relations are verbalized in translation and visualized in the so-called Du Bois’ narrative triangle. The triangle divulges these relations as a semiotic alignment that takes place in terms of cognitive transformations. Their specific nature is rooted in the process of verbalizing a visual object that is always accompanied by the changes of the aspects of the rendered painting. This process, consequently, conditions semiotic transformations of the verbalized object, or a parallax. Parallax in this study is identified as a system of cognitively underpinned transformations of the object that is rendered in an ekphrastic piece. Verbalizing two types of parallaxes are considered in the article. I designate an intermedial parallax that accounts for the transformations in verbalizing a visual object by the author of the original. Conversely, I consider a translation parallax as a system of cognitive operations with attention/salience deployed by the translator. Translation parallax is viewed in terms of the following operations: selection, scope of attention, scalar adjustment, and dynamic attention.

The effects of a cognitive linguistic approach on college students’ learning English tenses in Taiwan

This study investigated the effectiveness of cognitive linguistics-based instruction (CLI), as compared to that of traditional instruction (TI), in classrooms where English present and past tenses were taught to Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Seventy-nine non-English major freshmen at CEFR B1 level from a Taiwan university were divided into two groups: the CLI group ( N = 41) and the TI group ( N = 38). In CLI, the cognitive notion of immediacy/non-immediacy for the present/past tenses and how prototypical and peripheral senses of the English tenses are tackled in cognitive linguistics were introduced, and then interpretation tasks were given for familiarizing learners with the previously learned information. In TI, language facts were explained through grammatical taxonomies, such as generics encoded with simple present, and past events encoded with simple past, followed by interpretation tasks. To measure learning outcomes, a pretest, a posttest, and a delayed posttest were conducted one week before, one week after, and five weeks after the teaching intervention. A questionnaire was also given to explore learners’ learning awareness about English tense teaching. Results revealed that CLI could be a more efficient teaching method for tense selection than TI in both short- and long-term learning outcomes. In addition, learners receiving CLI, provided with tools for prospective autonomous learning, may make consistent progress, construct an ability to observe pragmatic contexts, and build better cross-linguistic awareness. These findings suggest positive implications for EFL teachers and researchers in integrating cognitive linguistics with grammar teaching.

Study of pragmatic and cognitive in modern linguistics

Cognitive linguistics is one of the relevant and not yet fully explored areas of linguistics. Research in the fields of pragmatic and cognitive linguistics is also one of the most urgent issues today. The purpose of this article is to research and conduct small studies about the specific role of pragmatics and cognition in Linguistics.

Et Forstyrret Kroppsbilde: Vurdering og Kategorisering av Kroppen I Linnéa Myhres Roman Evig Søndag

"A Distorted Body Image: Valuation and Categorization of the Human Body in Linnéa Myhre’s Novel Evig søndag (Eternal Sunday). The purpose of this article is to analyse the autobiographical novel Eternal Sunday by Linnéa Myhre in order to present the way in which the language reflects the valuation and categorization of the human body. The novel conveys the perspective of a person who suffers from an eating disorder. The way she is describing the human body is affected by the illness, and subconsciously associated with a particular distorted body image, beauty standards and expectations. The theoretical basis is rooted in cognitive linguistics and linguistic categories as proposed by George Lakoff. Cultural and psychological concepts are also taken into the account. Keywords: cognitive linguistics, body image, eating disorders, categorization, Norwegian literature"

THE EMOTIONAL CONCEPT OF “SADNESS” IN THE COLLECTION OF STORIES “THE ROOM FOR SORROW” BY ANDRII LYUBKA

Scholars from diverse fields of the humanities, including sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and others, have demonstrated a sustained interest in the realm of emotions. This is primarily because emotions are inextricably linked to crucial aspects of human existence such as behaviour, lifestyle, feelings and their expression, comprehension of the surrounding environment, and the human experience of life-altering circumstances. Every individual’s emotional landscape, as well as their linguistic expression, reflects a unique array of emotions. The article provides an overview of theoretical sources and examines the intricacies of the “concept” notion, which is central to the cognitive linguistics metalanguage. Moreover, the article introduces the term “emotional concept”, which constitutes fragments of the emotional landscape of an individual. In light of this, the language employed by select authors is of significant interest, as their works serve as a model of personal reinterpretation, while also reflecting their way of life, internal experiences, and the accuracy of their linguistic personality’s depiction of reality. The research presented in this article formulates and outlines methods for expressing the emotional concept of “sadness”, using the stories of Transcarpathian writer Andriy Lyubka as an exemplar. The emotional state of sadness has long captivated the attention of scholars across diverse fields of study. This is primarily because, alongside joy, it represents one of the two fundamental, polar emotions. The concept of sadness is universal, as it is comprehensible and relatable across all societies. Individuals can find themselves residing at the intersection of various intervals of sadness, which may arise from losses, disappointments, or physical and emotional pain. Given the universal and profound nature of this emotion, an exploration of Andrii Lyubka’s literary works allows for an examination of how the emotional concept of “sadness” is expressed across multiple language levels, including phraseology, stylistics, phonetics, morphology, and non-verbal communication. This research provides numerous examples that illustrate the description, usage, and implementation of the “sadness” concept within both written texts and spoken language. Key words: cognitive linguistics, linguistics of emotions, concept, emotional concept, emotional picture of the world, Andrii Lyubka.

Explaining the distribution of implicit means of misrepresentation: A case study on Italian immigration discourse

This study analyzes Fillmore's frames in a large corpus of Italian news headlines concerning migrations, dating from 2013 to 2021 and taken from newspapers of diverse ideological stances. Our goal is to assess whether, how, and why migrants' representation varies over time and across ideological stances. Our approach combines corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis with cognitive linguistics. We present a new methodology that exploits SocioFillmore, a tool integrating a novel Natural Language Processing model for automatic frame annotation into a web-based user interface for exploring frame-annotated corpora. In our corpus, the frequency distribution of frames varies over time according to detectable contextual factors. Across political stances, instead, the most frequent frames remain more constant: both right-winged and left-winged news providers contribute to reifying migrants into non-agentive entities. Further, in religious (Christian) press migrants are given a more humanizing depiction, but they still often appear in non-agentive roles. The distributions of frames can be explained by the fact that the latter act as indirect, routinized, and implicit means of (mis)representation. We suggest that framing entails inferential operations that take place unconsciously and can therefore escape the cognitive screening not only of those who receive discourse, but also of those who (re)produce it.

КОНЦЕПТУАЛІЗАЦІЯ ЛОКАЛЬНОГО ПРОСТОРУ КИЄВА В МОВІ ХУДОЖНЬОЇ ПРОЗИ ХХ СТОЛІТТЯ

The article examines the linguistic features of the conceptualization of the local space of the “Kyiv” mindset in the language of artistic prose by two outstanding Ukrainian writers of the 20th century. – V. Pidmohylnyi and P. Zahrebelnyi. Emphasis is placed on the fact that the local-spatial constant of the linguistic-cultural concept of the proper name “Kyiv”, reflected in the artistic discourses of artists, captures many urban and natural objects, which partially reflect the extremely complex topographical and coordinate grid of the real city. The system of urbanonyms, which represent the specifics of the individual and linguistic pictures of the world of novelists in terms of fixing the realities of the same city in different historical periods of its life, is studied. From the point of view of linguistic stylistics, a comparative analysis of expressive and figurative means of addressing the “Kyiv” mindset in the novel “The City” by V. Pidmohylnyi and in a number of historical novels and works about modernity by P. Zahrebelnyi was carried out. It is noted that the study of the verbalized constant of the local space of the city is an important issue not only for integrative linguistic stylistics, but also for cognitive linguistics, conceptology, linguistic and cultural studies, etc. The semantic-stylistic and logical-cognitive transformations of the internal forms of a number of proper names, which in P. Zahrebelnyi's artistic discourse have consistently evolved from an urbanonym to a concept have been traced. It was concluded that V. Pidmohylnyi, having “immersed” Stepan Radchenko, a rural man, in the urbanized space with its anthropogenic landscape, was one of the first Ukrainian writers of the beginning of the 20th century. conceptualized the city as a determining factor in the civilizational and historical development of society. In the artistic discourse of P. Zahrebelnyi, numerous linguistic units that nominate the real landscape of the city reflect the philosophy of the author's vision of Kyiv as a unique, originally Ukrainian city, as it appears in the national-linguistic picture of the world.

Cognitive Linguistics: Disclosure of Cognitive Processes in Language Perception from an Analytical Perspective

Cognitive Linguistics: Disclosure of Cognitive Processes in Language Perception from an Analytical Perspective