Henri Meschonnic famously gives specific usage to a repertoire of terms such as subjectivity, continuous, rhythm, historicity, recitative and enunciation. Behind them, there is a project to overcome what he calls the “chain of dualisms” (1988), or the tendency toward dichotomy in theoretical thinking, represented in the language fields by the separations between signifier and signified, oral and written, form and content, and others. Following Philip Wilson’s (2012) initiative of applying Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concepts of language games and forms of life (...) to translation studies, we seek to draw an analogy between the Wittgensteinian leap from analytics to pragmatics and the Meschonnician leap from sign to discourse, with the aim of investigating the viability of a synthesis of the two authors’ ideas as a theoretical and methodological proposition for Translation Studies. Meschonnic proposes that the sign (enunciate) be overcome in favor of discourse (enunciation), which he views as a relationship between language and body. We argue that the linguistic experience, in that light, is akin to a performance and that Wittgenstein, by focusing on the use of language, also favors this idea, which may be a possible key for a theoretical practice of translation. (shrink)

This paper investigates the interaction between language, culture, body and emotions. It is an aspect of cognitive semantics that discusses the Akan somatic nature of their body and therefore have existing lexical items, idioms and proverbs to comment on “wellbeing”. It is based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and Ethnopragmatics by Goddard (2006). A great parts of Akan expressions for “wellbeing” are tapped from body parts through their physical, cognitive, and emotional representations. The nature of the (...) derived semantic patterns and how the Akans consider these somatic expressions, idioms and proverbs as important aspects of their language and culture are discussed. This paper argues that “wellbeing” as an emotion is transitional like a pendulum; one can be enjoying aspects of “wellbeing” for a moment and be in “distress” and “depression” a moment later. (shrink)

This study compares the use of interactional metadiscourse in a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, and a British news magazine, The Economist, in reporting on the Brexit referendum. We adopted Hyland’s (2005a:48–54) framework to analyze hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagements, and self-mentions. One hundred news articles were randomly selected from online archives from February to June in 2016, during which time the debatable issue was discussed ardently. Quantitative and qualitative results of this study revealed both similarities and differences between the (...) newspaper and the news magazine in the use of interactional metadiscourse. For example, quantitatively, the frequencies of boosters in both genres were similar; however, the newspaper used much more engagement markers and self-mentions whereas the magazine used more hedges and attitude markers. Qualitatively, while most self-mentions were the same in both genres, a unique choice of self-mentions was found in the news magazine. (shrink)

The present article focuses on certain points in the semantics/pragmatics debate. Among these, one of the most interesting is the possibility of reconciling, independent of the context, certain aspects of meaning which have always been the subject of discussion in formal semantics, with the view that meaning is socially and situationally conditioned. Recent new insights concerning the importance of pragmatics for enriching the propositional content of the utterance should not lead to a radical contextualism that denies the assignment of any (...) role at all to semantics. Instead, it is possible to argue that both dimensions, semantics and pragmatics, along with their constituent parts, offer fundamental contributions to the transmission and understanding of the overall meaning of a (spoken or written) text. (shrink)

Commercial advertisements are considered informative discourse, whereas the manipulative effects of their verbal and visual strategies have been ignored. According to van Dijk (2006), manipulation in mass media is performed by drawing the audience’s attention to information A rather than to B, by providing irrelevant or incomplete information, and by playing emotional games. Since the analysis of manipulative effects of semiotic features used in advertisements is scarce, the present research project investigates the potential manipulative effects of semiotic aspects used in (...) Persian printed advertisements, and the influence of the Iranian sociocultural context on designing these visual messages. A corpus of 160 Persian printed advertisements was analyzed; the results revealed that their semiotic features, especially those which are meaningful based on the sociocultural context of Iran, tend to inculcate relevant information and meaning in consumers, in order to control their minds and subsequently their purchases. The findings of this study include six theme-based categories of semiotic manipulation strategies: Celebrity images, Creative images, Punctuation marks, Natural images, Seasonal images, and Cultural images. The results are discussed along the lines of research methodology in discourse and semiotic analysis. (shrink)

This paper explores how readers of Chinese mainstream media editorials use disagreement strategies to attack the institutional face of the mainstream media organizations on Weibo. By quantitative and qualitative analysis, the disagreement strategies in Weibo comments were elaborated based on the logos-oriented and ethos-oriented distinction. It was found that logos-oriented disagreements were employed to criticize the content of the editorial, ethos-oriented ad-hominem disagreements were employed to attack the trustworthiness and impartiality of the mainstream media organizations, and ethos-oriented ad-personam disagreements were (...) pure insults to express their negative emotions to the mainstream media organizations. The findings suggested that the online commenting space of Chinese mainstream media editorials is a public sphere of combined deliberation and liberal individualism. This study adds to existing literature the disagreement strategies used in online comments while shedding light on the role of online comments in the public sphere building in the Chinese social media context. (shrink)