Manuela Romano

The structure of emotion discourse: from Labovian to socio-cognitive models

Abstract This paper focuses on how narrators convey emotion in the structure of oral narrative discourse in Spanish. To this end, the structure of personal oral narratives of highly emotional events in a sample of radio narratives is analyzed from two different approaches: Labovian and socio-cognitive. This work shows, first, how the Labovian approach to personal oral narratives of “vivid” events is applied to emotionally charged texts and, second, how the theoretical concepts of mental spaces and conceptual integration theory, as well as the latest developments within socio-cognitive theories, can help to better understand the processes that, on the one hand, enable speakers to create bonds with the listener, and on the other hand, enable hearers to make sense of the apparently chaotic information presented in these particular types of narratives.

Newspaper Metaphors: Reusing Metaphors Across Media Genres

This article shows how the specific discourse situation and sociocultural context influence the development and degree of entrenchment of metaphor in language. Two metaphors are analyzed and contrasted in two different communities and times: signs of a positive change are green shoots in Spanish newspapers throughout 2009, and obstacles for success are an ash cloud in the British press in 2010. Because these metaphors emerged in different sociocultural, political and geographical contexts, in different languages, and in different discursive communities, each underwent a distinct development, degree of expansion and divergent pragmatic and semantic changes. Both metaphors are paradigmatic examples of genre re-contextualization (Linell, 2009; Linell & Sarangi, 1998; Semino, 2011) and of semantic change in progress.

The Conceptualisation of austerity in the Portuguese, Spanish and Irish Press

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the conceptualisation of austerity in three different European cultures by identifying metaphorical expressions used in one representative newspaper of the Portuguese, the Spanish and the Irish press between 2011 and 2012. The metaphors were identified by searching for three keywords from the field of economy and politics (austeridade-austeridad-austerity, corte-recorte-cut and divida-deuda-debt) and were then classified according to the type of schema they instantiate, namely, propositional schema, image schema or event schema. Assuming the general framework of Cultural Linguistics and corpus-based and discourse-based approaches to conceptual metaphor, the study highlights how metaphor can be a powerful conceptual and discourse strategy to frame economic, political and social issues and to serve emotional and ideological purposes. Through metaphor, the strongly mediatised political and economic debate about austerity measures and policies becomes effectively persuasive and manipulative. The analysis shows that the newspapers resort to the same schemas and metaphors. However, the differences in the frequency of the types of schema and the specific metaphors suggest that different socio-historical and cultural conceptualisations result in the different types and rates of metaphors in the three cultures under analysis, i.e. a deep conservative morality of self-discipline and punishment, in the case of Portugal; a strong sense of outrage against austerity measures and their creditors, in Spain; and the idea that the crisis and its effects were hitting the country but not as seriously as others, in Ireland.

‘The tide, change, nobody can stop it’: Metaphor for social action

Based on critical approaches to discourse and metaphor, as well as on cognitive models of metaphorical creativity and recontextualization, this article analyses the origin and evolution of the marea (‘tide’) metaphor as a tool for social action within recent Spanish protest movements (2011–2016). From an initial image metaphor representing different protest groups, to the use of the expression to identify a number of grassroots political parties, among other new meanings, the metaphor has proved to be an important tool in the legitimation of recent social action and change in Spanish society since the eruption of the 15M movement in 2011. By tracking its development, the study explains not only how the source domain marea activates highly positive meanings and emotions within the targets social protest, political parties, change and so on, but also how this ideological, socio-culturally conditioned, cognitively situated metaphor is becoming entrenched in the community within a very specific socio-historical and cultural context.