Veronika Koller

Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse

This article aims at reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. By contrast, cognitive metaphor research has recently developed to emphasize the embodied, i.e. neural, origins of metaphor at the expense of its sociodiscursive impact. This article takes up the concept of social cognition, arguing that it organizes the modification of, and access to, cognitive resources, with metaphoric models playing a particularly salient role in the constitution of ideology. In a cyclical process, ideology will help particular models gain prominence in discourse, which will, in turn, impact on cognition. To illustrate the point, the article draws on an extensive corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions, showing how that particular discourse centres on an ideologically vested metaphoric model of evolutionary struggle.

Handbook of communication in the public sphere

HAL 4 - Handbook of Language and Communication in the Public SphereTable of Contents Introduction: Shifting boundaries and emergent public spheres (Veronika Koller and Ruth Wodak) Part A: Theoretical Foundations 1. Language, communication and the public s.

‘Metaphoring’ people out of this world: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a chairman's statement of a UK defence firm

Abstract We introduce Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), an interdisciplinary approach to analysing written and spoken texts, which provides accounting researchers with a range of resources to analyse corporate narrative documents more systematically and in more detail from a linguistic perspective. CDA addresses how the content and the linguistic features of texts influence, and are in turn influenced, by the contexts of text production, distribution, reception and adaptation, and by the wider socio-economic context in which texts are embedded. We apply Fairclough’s (2003, 2006) Dialectic-Relational approach to the analysis of a chairman’s statement of a UK defence firm. The focus of analysis is on the grammatical devices used to represent organisational activities and outcomes in ways which obfuscate social agency (impersonalisation) and to evaluate social actors, entities, and social events (evaluation). We find that impersonalisation and evaluation are used strategically to guide organisational audiences’ interpretations of financial performance and to legitimise and normalise violence and destruction by depicting it in an abstract and sanitised manner.

The online use of Violence and Journey metaphors by patients with cancer, as compared with health professionals: a mixed methods study

Objective To compare the frequencies with which patients with cancer and health professionals use Violence and Journey metaphors when writing online; and to investigate the use of these metaphors by patients with cancer, in view of critiques of war-related metaphors for cancer and the adoption of the notion of the ‘cancer journey’ in UK policy documents. Design Computer-assisted quantitative and qualitative study of two data sets totalling 753 302 words. Setting A UK-based online forum for patients with cancer (500 134 words) and a UK-based website for health professionals (253 168 words). Participants 56 patients with cancer writing online between 2007 and 2012; and 307 health professionals writing online between 2008 and 2013. Results Patients with cancer use both Violence metaphors and Journey metaphors approximately 1.5 times per 1000 words to describe their illness experience. In similar online writing, health professionals use each type of metaphor significantly less frequently. Patients’ Violence metaphors can express and reinforce negative feelings, but they can also be used in empowering ways. Journey metaphors can express and reinforce positive feelings, but can also be used in disempowering ways. Conclusions Violence metaphors are not by default negative and Journey metaphors are not by default a positive means of conceptualising cancer. A blanket rejection of Violence metaphors and an uncritical promotion of Journey metaphors would deprive patients of the positive functions of the former and ignore the potential pitfalls of the latter. Instead, greater awareness of the function (empowering or disempowering) of patients’ metaphor use can lead to more effective communication about the experience of cancer.

The world's local bank : glocalisation as a strategy in corporate branding discourse

This paper looks at how HSBC banking group represent themselves in their externally oriented discourse as a brand combining the global and the local. Drawing on a variety of samples such as history brochures, advertisements and websites, the study combines quantitative and qualitative methods in its analysis of how visual and linguistic elements function to construct the HSBC brand. It is argued that branding in this case relies on a stereotyped version of the local that is used to endow the brand with a “human touch” and create brand affinity with a globalised audience. In cognitive terms, the company is seen to blend the two schemas of the global and the local and to metaphorically emulate perceived consumer identities to the same end.

Metaphor, Politics and Gender: a Case Study from Germany

In this chapter we apply the theoretical and analytical framework introduced in Chapter 2 to a corpus containing a selection of speeches and interviews by two contemporary Italian politicians, Silvio Berlusconi and Emma Bonino. As in the previous chapter, we combine the main tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Kovecses 2002) with a social constructivist view of gender (Sunderland 2004) in order to consider the rhetorical functions and ideological implications of metaphor use (see also Koller 2004, Semino 2008). More specifically, we attempt to explain the differences and similarities in the metaphoric choices made by a male and female politician in terms of a range of sources of variation, including political orientation, topics, concerns, goals and audiences (see also Kovecses 2005). These factors help us to interpret the particular ways in which each individual politician performs femininity and masculinity in their public discourse.

Deliberate Conventional Metaphor in Images: The Case of Corporate Branding Discourse

Recent discussions on the use of metaphor have centered on how it may be used in a way that has been said to require mandatory attention to the fact that it is metaphorical, resulting in what has come to be known as deliberate metaphor (Steen, 2008). While metaphor deliberateness and conventionality/novelty are conceptually distinct, associations are likely to exist in practice. This article focuses on the deliberate use of conventional metaphor in images, by way of examining the use of animate and anthropomorphic metaphors in an instance of corporate branding discourse (i.e., the prospectuses of Singapores corporatized universities). Through our analysis, we show that deliberate conventional metaphor serves to reinforce particular conceptualizations rather than effect radical conceptual change. Moreover, we discuss visual and multimodal metaphor as deliberate if used in carefully crafted texts and draw on the notion of an images connotative meaning to point out how such deliberateness can be further accentuated. The article concludes by discussing some implications for how the degree of conventionality is likely to have an effect on how deliberate metaphor achieves its key objective of changing addressees’ concepts of a particular Target.

'Good' and 'bad' deaths: Narratives and professional identities in interviews with hospice managers

This article explores the formal and functional characteristics of narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths as they were told by 13 UK-based hospice managers in the course of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees’ responses include a variety of remarkably consistent ‘narratives of successful/frustrated intervention’, which exhibit distinctive formal characteristics in terms of the starting point and core of the action, the choice of personal pronouns and metaphors, and the ways in which positive and negative evaluation is expressed. In functional terms, the hospice managers’ narratives play an important role in representing and constructing their professional views, challenges and identities. Overall, the narratives argue for the role of hospices and professional hospice staff in facilitating a ‘good’ death, and, by presenting a relatively unified view, may potentially preclude alternative perspectives.

Missions and Empires: Religious and Political Metaphors in Corporate Discourse

Proposing a paradigm shift from religion to politics to business as the defining power in post-industrial societies, this chapter looks at how residues of the former two surface in corporate discourse as metaphoric expressions (e.g. corporate mission, empire-building). Market factors such as global competition and saturated demand are forcing companies to differentiate themselves by constructing corporate brand personalities. Simultaneously, multi-national corporations have amassed economic and political power that in many cases already exceeds that of nation states, let alone faith-based communities. This chapter argues that the producers of corporate discourse appropriate previous paradigms by means of metaphor both to construct their brand personality and to legitimate their increasingly hegemonic role by drawing on established, if historical, sources of power.1

Constructing (non-)normative identities in written lesbian discourse: A diachronic study

This article provides an analysis of two texts written from a lesbian subject position at different points in recent history, to show how the authors construct (non-)normative in-group representations. The study is based on theoretical notions from discourse theory, queer theory and social cognition research, and uses a mostly data-driven analytical approach. The two texts, a manifesto and a journal article, are investigated to see how they use nomination and predication to construct in- and out-group representations, to what extent these identities are non-normative and why they are constructed in this particular way. Results show a stark demarcation of a positive, non-complex in-group from a negative, equally non-complex out-group in the earlier text, which contrasts with a more differentiated and less uniformly positive in-group representation in the later text. This is explained with the respective socio-political context, and the earlier text is interpreted as promoting a more explicitly normative in-group representation.