Gillian Susan Philip

Colouring Meaning: Collocation and connotation in figurative language

Primarily focused on idioms and other figurative phraseology, Colouring Meaning describes how the meanings of established phrases are enhanced, refocused and modified in everyday language use. Unlike many studies of creativity in language, this book-length survey addresses the matter at several levels, from the purely linguistic level of collocation, through its abstractions in colligation and semantic preference, to semantic prosody and connotation. This journey through both linguistic and cognitive levels involves the examination of habitual language and its exploitations, both mundane and colourful, explaining the phenomena observed in terms of current psycholinguistic research as well as corpus linguistics theory and analysis. The relationships between meaning in text and meaning in the mind are discussed at length and extensively illustrated with worked case studies to offer the reader a comprehensive overview of metaphorical and other secondary meanings as they emerge in real-world communicative situations.

Non una donna in politica, ma una donna politica: Women’s Political Language in an Italian Context

Politics in Italy is a complicated business. There is a bewildering number of parties representing every possible hue of the political spectrum. New parties spring up almost yearly — some fielding only one candidate — and coalitions are formed and dissolved with remarkable ease. Stemming from this situation is a widespread interest in the politicians themselves, and the ways in which they negotiate, pontificate and manipulate through language. No Italian political figure is better documented in this respect than Silvio Berlusconi, who has exploited his background in the mass media to the full. His adoption of football metaphors (Semino and Masci 1996) was one of a number of successful rhetorical strategies which, by appealing to the wider populace, won him the first of his three premierships. Similar strategies were adopted the second time, attracting a greater number of in-depth linguistic studies (see, for example, Amadori 2002; see also Bolasco et al. 2006 for a quantitative analysis); however, his third successful election campaign in 2008 was characterised by a remarkable absence of such rhetoric and a shift towards the more sober political style of the elder statesman.

A Review of “Lexical priming: a new theory of words and language"

Lexical priming is, as its title boldly claims, a new theory; not because it prioritises lexis, but because it prioritises the individual’s experience of language acquisition and use, taking lexis as a starting point. Priming is viewed here as a bottom-up process of lexical patternforming, expressed in terms of phraseology, not grammar. The rejection of grammar as an organising feature of language is also radical, and a matter that will not pass unchallenged, but Hoey provides a compelling argument, namely that ‘[t]here is not . . . a single grammar to the language (indeed there is not a single language), but a multiplicity of overlapping grammars that are the product of the attempt to generalise out of primed collocations’ (p. 47). If no single grammar can be identified, then, linguistics turns to lexis. With this book, Hoey is making a break with corpus linguistic tradition by placing the individual language user at centre stage: ‘it is implicit in the notion of priming that the language user’s experience of the language(s) they use is unique to them’ (p. 30). This does not imply, however, that the armchair linguist can safely return to introspection. The analyses offered in this book provide ample demonstration of the qualitative differences between introspectively derived language and that created with genuine communicative purpose. Yet, if the focus is on the individual, a further question remains: where precisely do corpora fit in? Several answers are put forward. One is that the linguistic experiences of individuals overlap considerably, a major source of which is exposure to the media. Hoey justifies his use of a corpus of Guardian news and features by suggesting that the habitual reading of a newspaper is likely to contribute to priming in a relatively large group of people. The same general principle applies to particular text genres (travel writing is examined several times), and the language used within particular discourse communities is also deemed to contribute to priming. Apart from making it possible to study specialised language, corpora can reveal patterns of usage at an organisational level, and this matter is central to the theory offered. Both introspection and manual analysis flounder when required to make statements at the level of text, let alone when confronted with the finest details of lexical use, such as preference for Theme, and paragraph-initial position, but aversion for text-initial position (cf. p. 130). That said, ‘[p]rimings can be explored in ways other than corpus analysis’ (p. 139), and the author bolsters his argument effectively with the use of experimental data, and emphasises the individual nature of priming through anecdote. While the theory of lexical priming has grown out of the study of collocation, it attempts to address some of the questions that have not yet been answered satisfactorily by corpus linguistics. What makes the approach outlined here genuinely novel – at least, as far as corpus linguistics is concerned – is the move away from observing the behaviour of words, to focus instead on what the language user does with words. It is unfortunate therefore