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Detail of contribution

Auteur: Tim ROHRER

Co-Auteur(s): Mary Jean Vignone

Titre:
Persuasive communication, speaker standpoint and embodied cognition


Abstract/Résumé: The embodied cognition movement encompasses a wide variety of approaches to embodiment, ranging from experimental neuroimaging studies to developmental research to the social and cultural milieu in which the individual is embedded. In this talk I address issues of speaker standpoint and persuasive efficacy that are all too often overlooked in cognitive linguistics approaches to the analysis of discourse, such as conceptual integration theory or conceptual metaphor theory, particularly when the discourse is not divorced from its communicative context. In a long-term study of both oral and written discourse concerning the 2007-8 financial crisis (conducted together with Mary Jean Vignone), we found the discourse to be marked by watershed moments, where one speaker offered a metaphor which was rejected in favor of another speaker's, or a speaker offered a metaphoric expression (e.g. 'vampire squid') that was quickly adopted and became a new norm for characterizing the situation. We argue that such insights pose methodological challenges to computational and statistical approaches to conceptual metaphor/integration imported from corpus linguistics.