Cognition, Communication, Discourse

Discourse dynamics of concepts in a war narrative: A cognitive-narratological analysis of Daniel Kraus’s "Angel Down"

2026-05-30T19:20:03+00:00

This study investigates the discourse dynamics of key concepts in the narrative through a corpus-based analysis of Daniel Kraus’s Angels Down, an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I the soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war. Focusing on concepts such as WAR, SOLDIER, DEATH, FEAR, CAMP, and HOME, the research examines how lexical frequency, collocational patterns, and contextual distribution reflect the actualization and interpretation of meaning across the text. The corpus was segmented according to Voyant Tools platform, allowing both absolute and relative frequency measures to be calculated for each segment. Contextual analysis using KWIC, collocates, and other Voyant Tools instruments enabled identification of key concepts and analysis of their discourse dynamics through narrative functions and interpretation. Findings indicate that key concepts are highly dynamic, with their prominence and meaning varying according to narrative position and formal features such as sentence length and paragraph segmentation. The extended, looping sentences maintain the continuous activation of WAR and DEATH concepts, creating cumulative semantic intensity and reflecting psychological and emotional dimensions of the narrative. Paragraph breaks, while visually dividing the text, do not reset conceptual focus, allowing concepts to accumulate and interact with contextual elements, producing nuanced interpretations. These results support the hypothesis that conceptual units in narrative discourse are context-dependent and dynamically modulated by formal textual features. The study demonstrates the value of integrating quantitative corpus methods with qualitative interpretive analysis, providing a model for examining the interplay between narrative form and conceptual meaning. Implications extend to cognitive-narratological research, highlighting how textual structure, plot progression, and changes in narrative focus, can actively shape concept realization, salience, and semantic framing.

Meaning transformation in multimodal digital media and translation strategies

2026-05-30T19:20:07+00:00

The article explores semantic and pragmatic transformations in digital media translation, identifying the key lingual and extralingual factors shaping meaning construction in technologically mediated communication and outlining effective translation strategies for preserving communicative intent in target-language media discourse. The study argues that digital media discourse, unlike traditional written texts, is multimodal, compressed, immediate, and audience-oriented, which increases meaning variability and strengthens the translator’s mediating role. Particular attention is given to lingual factors operating at the lexical, syntactic, discourse, and pragmatic levels. The article emphasizes the decisive role of extralingual factors in shaping meaning interpretation and translation strategies, often prioritizing communicative efficiency and relevance over formal equivalence. Semantic transformation strategies in digital media translation are analysed with a focus on compression and expansion, realized through omission, concretization, generalization, and explication. Pragmatic transformations are examined in terms of modulation of illocutionary force, pragmatic reframing, recontextualization, and compensation. Special attention is devoted to conveying implicit meaning in translation, which is identified as a core feature of multimodal digital media discourse. The study outlines three main translation strategies for rendering implicit meaning: preservation of implicitness, partial explication, and compensation. The findings confirm that semantic and pragmatic transformations in digital media translation function as adaptive mechanisms rather than distortions of meaning. Translation is conceptualized as a context-sensitive, decision-driven process of mediated meaning construction shaped by platform conventions, audience expectations, and communicative goals.

Pleonasms in English and Ukrainian: Lexical-semantic and pragmatic aspects

2026-06-04T17:28:02+00:00

Pleonasms and pleonastic constructions represent complex processes of interaction between the logic of speech and its expressiveness, between the economy of linguistic means and stylistic overload. The problem of pleonasm or verbosity development represents important linguistic aspects, which are in the focus of present day linguistics. Its resolution touches upon fundamental issues of linguistics in general and semantics in particular, since in the modern context it is crucial to express oneself concisely, to form statements capable of objectively conveying information without elements that duplicate each other’s content, which is the essence of the language economy law. The relevance of the study is grounded in the high frequency of pleonastic constructions in modern communication and in the lack of systematic research addressing their functional potential. Pleonasm is often perceived as a hidden linguistic phenomenon, since in everyday communication it is rarely recognized as redundancy. Speakers intuitively accept pleonastic combinations as natural and even necessary, because their redundant elements are semantically integrated and no longer consciously perceived as repetitive. In this sense, pleonasm is explicit in structure but implicit in awareness: its redundancy is objectively present, yet subjectively unnoticed by language users. The paper considers the phenomenon of pleonasm through the prism of linguistic norms and linguistic usage, outlines its stylistic and syntactic potentials. The key object of the analysis of the problem is the conscious use of pleonastic compounds as means of expressiveness, as well as underlying semantic nature and pragmalinguistic force of constructions. Despite their prevalence in everyday speech, media discourse, literature, academic and public communication, pleonasms remain insufficiently described from a comparative and pragmalinguistic perspective. This paper responds to this problem by analyzing pleonasm as a dynamic phenomenon shaped by cognitive, historical, and communicative factors. Notwithstanding a previous scientific research on pleonasms as constructions that overload the text with unnecessary words, the study proved that pleonasticity performs important pragmatic functions in both the English and Ukrainian languages such as quantitative, emphatic and vocative functions in literary texts and poetic language where these stylistic techniques emotionally color the content.

Multimodal composition of infographics embedded in online news discourse

2026-05-30T19:20:13+00:00

The article investigates the multimodal arrangement of infographics embedded in online news discourse as one of the most effective means of representing complex information in the contemporary digital communication environment. The study is based on the theoretical framework of multimodality and multimodal discourse analysis, which regard meaning as a product of interaction between multiple semiotic resources. Within the context of online news communication, infographic objects are treated as integral multimodal units combining verbal, visual, typographic, spatial, numerical, and chromatic semiotic resources into a coherent communicative whole. As to the degree of semantic autonomy of infographic objects in relation to the verbal news text, the online news infographics may be classified into fully autonomous, partially dependent, and fully dependent on the news text itself. The article also highlights the principle models of constructing infographic objects and establishes that the most frequent compositional models include cartographic-based constructions and spatial-organizational structures with vertical or horizontal classification of information. The verbal mode primarily performs explanatory, nominative, and anchoring functions; visual, diagrammatic, and spatial elements structure information and guide interpretation. Typographic and color resources contribute to emphasis, hierarchy, and salience. Results reveal that infographics function as highly cohesive multimodal units whose communicative efficiency is ensured through the synergistic interaction of heterogeneous semiotic resources. Their composition is strategically organized to optimize perception, compress information, and strengthen the pragmatic impact of news communication.

Means of constructing modal meanings in the 18th-century French manuscript.pdf

2026-05-31T22:36:34+00:00

This study identifies the distinctive features of constructing modal meanings in the French manuscript Herbier Medical contenant vingt et une classes de plantes usuelles dont on fait le plus frequemment usage dans la pratique de la Medicine Rangées selon les vertus qui leur sont les plus generallement reconnues (1759) by means of constructions with the indefinite personal pronoun ON. The relevance of this research is determined by the need for a comprehensive understanding of the linguistic and discursive mechanisms of meaning construction in 18th-century French scientific texts, which are viewed as elements of a historically variable system of knowledge (in Michel Foucault’s paradigm), as exemplified by the medical herbal manuscript that combines descriptive-classificatory and medico-prescriptive functions.

The manuscript reveals types of modality that qualify propositional content in relation to different parameters: epistemic modality – with respect to certainty and probability, presenting statements as reliable, verified, and customary; deontic modality – with respect to normativity and permissibility, expressing necessity, prescription, permission, or prohibition of medical procedures; alethic modality – with respect to logical-ontological possibility, as typical and natural; axiological modality evaluates statements as positive or negative in terms of the effectiveness or harmfulness of the described medical practices. From the perspective of cognitive anthropology, constructions with the indefinite personal pronoun ON function as means of constructing meanings of CERTAINTY, NECESSITY, POSSIBILITY, and VALUE in the scientific domains of botany and medicine.

The dominant meanings in the manuscript are regulatory, actualized through deontic modality, since most statements construct meanings of normative regulation of therapeutic, medical, and prescription procedures. Modality in the manuscript has a non-linear organization: the boundaries between individual types are not rigidly defined but are interpenetrating. Constructions with the indefinite personal pronoun ON serve as a tool of a depersonalized mode of knowledge representation, which was characteristic of the 18th-century French scientific and medical discourse. At the macro-level, meaning construction in the manuscript is structured by a cultural schema that entails the elaboration of mental representations: RELIABLE KNOWLEDGE ABOUT A PLANT → NECESSITY OF ITS MEDICINAL USE → POSSIBILITY OF ITS USE → THERAPEUTIC VALUE OF THE PLANT in accordance with the episteme of the Enlightenment era.

Inter- and crossmodal resemiotization in AI-generated political memes: The case of Amelia

2026-06-04T14:38:02+00:00

The present paper is a study of metaphorical resemiotization in AI-generated memes responding to the Pathways: Navigating Gaming, The Internet & Extremism UK government-funded online game. The memes were posted on X (formerly Twitter) in January and February 2026. Resting on the theoretical premises of conceptual (multimodal) metaphor and metonymy, the author proposes an integrated framework for inter- and cross-modal resemiotization in (AI-generated) political memes. This framework consists of three stepwise levels: (1) the visual-grammatical; (2) the intersemiotic-metaphorical, and (3) the multimodal discourse-analytical. The findings suggest that on the visual-grammatical level Amelia-associated memes under analysis are predominantly symbolic-attributive, mildly authoritative, and are constructed mostly around the GIVEN/NEW informational values. Clustered around the superordinate contextual metaphor, BRITAIN IS A COZY HOME, the memes instantiate several distinct metaphorical and, metonymic scenarios. These are BRITAIN IS A NOSTALGIC HOME, BRITAIN IS A CIVIC HOMELAND, BRITAIN IS A FORTRESS UNDER SIEGE, and BRITAIN IS A POLITICAL PROGRAM, and Parliament for heritage, Parliament for the nation, person for the nation, etc. The shared presupposition across all sub-metaphors is that BRITAIN HAS BEEN LOST/DAMAGED AND MUST BE RESTORED/DEFENDED. Evidenced from the meme corpus, metaphorical resemiotization occurred when attributes with chiefly negative connotations in educational discourse (Pathways) were transferred to and AI-modified in social media discourse (X), having been assigned positive meanings.

Profiling the concept of TRAUMA in English-language educational discourse

2026-05-30T19:20:20+00:00

The article presents a linguo-cognitive analysis of the profiling of the concept of TRAUMA in English-language educational discourse. The relevance of the study is determined by the increasing role of traumatic experience in contemporary society and the integration of the trauma-informed approach into educational practices. The aim of the study is to identify the specific features of the actualization of the core and peripheral attributes of the concept TRAUMA within the institutional educational environment and to determine the cognitive mechanisms underlying its profiling. The theoretical and methodological framework is grounded in cognitive semantics, conceptual metaphor theory, discourse analysis, and linguoconceptology. The research material includes dictionary definitions, online courses, academic textbooks, and scholarly articles on trauma-informed education. The study reconstructs a multi-level frame model of the concept TRAUMA, encompassing the following profiles: prototypical (injury), clinical (diagnosis and symptomatology), neurobiological (embodied memory), therapeutic (recovery), pedagogical (educational environment), and socio-relational (disrupted connections). It is established that dictionary discourse fixes the medical-physical core of the concept, whereas educational discourse performs its functional re-profiling, from a category of pathology to a category of pedagogical responsibility, safety, and support. Within the trauma-informed approach, trauma is interpreted as a contextual factor that shapes communicative strategies, ethical standards, and institutional practices. The study demonstrates that the profiling of the concept TRAUMA is selective in nature: features such as regulation, resilience, empathy, and inclusivity are foregrounded, while purely clinical aspects shift to the periphery. Metaphorical models TRAUMA AS WOUND, BURDEN, JOURNEY perform both cognitive and pragmatic functions, enabling an empathetic reinterpretation of learners’ behavioral manifestations. The findings indicate a transformation of the semantic core of the concept TRAUMA in English-language educational discourse and its integration into the system of pedagogical ethics.

Conceptogram of the song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and its foreign-language paratexts

2026-05-30T19:20:23+00:00

The object of the research is the text of the English-language anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and its foreign-language versions (paratexts), while the subject of the article is the song’s conceptogram. The aim of the study is to clarify the ways and means of objectification and subjectivation of the concepts of the song in texts of different status. The work is based on the methodological principles of the cognitive-discursive paradigm of linguistics with an emphasis on methods of conceptual analysis.

The study has revealed that each foreign-language paratext of the song is created according to a clearly defined algorithm corresponding to its content and form, largely determined by the original’s overarching anti-war pathos, which portrays war as an evil.

The conceptogram is a symbiotic configuration of mental units, specific for a certain text or group of texts. The song’s conceptogram consists of textual explicature-based concepts (domains, autochthons, allochthons) and subtextual implicature-based concepts (existential and negatively emotive). At the same time, a number of semantically important concepts in the song are objectivated only in its specific national versions or are not verbalized at all, remaining in the subtext, or even dispersed in the textual matter. It has been found out that among the linguistic signs of the song the most dispersed is the concept of TIME, due to which it turns out to be a global mentefact for this song. The concept TIME is grammatically actualized through the perspective of ‘the past’.

The study demonstrates that the song’s textual concepts of various types possess lexical-semantic valence, which enables them to form intertype relations governed by interconceptual correlations associated with the genre, theme, and the author’s idiostyle. The same factors also regulate the synonymous representation of concepts in the national versions of the song. Against this background, the limited lexical resources available for structuring the concept corpus remain evident, resulting from restrictions on deviations from the core ideological and artistic line of the texts.

Sound in the multimodal construction of health and convenience: A case study of Sweetgreen’s Instagram advertising

2026-05-30T19:20:27+00:00

Healthy food consumption and promotion are increasingly prominent trends in contemporary culture, reflected in the proliferation of healthy food products and their advertising in online media. Research has shown that such advertising is multimodal, yet sound is less frequently analyzed in detail than visuals and written language. The article aims to address this gap by demonstrating the meaning-making potential of sound in multimodal construction of health and convenience in a promotional Instagram Reel of a U.S. fast-casual restaurant Sweetgreen. Conducting a case study enabled us to perform a thorough analysis of sound and its interplay with the visual mode in order to highlight its potential importance as a semiotic resource in short-form promotional videos. The video was selected from a corpus of Sweetgreen Instagram Reels posted in 2025 as an information-rich example that foregrounds the presentation of a single product and relies on montage rather than spoken explanation or interview-style delivery, and combines music, object and ambient sounds. The visual track was analyzed through Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual social semiotic framework and the auditory track through Graakjær’s framework for sound and music to identify the meaning-making potentials of each track in isolation. Afterwards, the interaction between modes was examined through the adapted Martinec and Salway’s system of status and logico-semantic relations to identify the contribution of each mode to the overall advertising message. The analysis shows that the visual montage compresses food preparation by omitting food labor and presents each ingredient as natural, pure, seasonal and fresh. The sound not only enhances the visual meanings, but also signifies the ongoing, coherent process of food preparation absent from the visual track, and frames it as artisanal craft rather than impersonal, mechanical action. The sound also uniquely provides circumstantial naturalness, thus adding a health-relevant meaning. Taken together, the sound is not merely decorative, but a key semiotic resource that helps convey brand values. Broader corpus-based analysis remains a task for future research.

Relevance theory in environmental marketing: A multimodal analysis of eco-advertising

2026-05-30T19:20:30+00:00

The 2021 Nestlé (NESCAU) advertisement “Safira”, created by Ogilvy Brazil, is a campaign that contrasts the 20‑year journey of self‑discovery of a transgender person with the permanent and destructive nature of a single plastic straw in a coral reef. This article presents the interpretative process of this eco‑advertising commercial from the perspective of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, 2015, 2025; Carston, 2002; Wilson and Sperber, 2012). This genre falls within a subset of “green advertising” in corporate communication, focusing on environmental sustainability to influence consumer perception. The data used in this study derive from descriptive and qualitative research. Our analysis has the following general objectives: (a) to examine whether Relevance Theory can effectively analyse the audiovisual genre; (b) to present an analysis using elements that support communication, such as sensory elements, which include visual (sight), auditory (hearing), tactile (touch), olfactory (smell), and gustatory (taste) modalities; contextual and spatial elements, encompassing time (chronemics), space and distance (proxemics), and silence as a meaningful communicative resource; and action and state elements, which involve higher‑level interpretations such as attitudes or illocutionary acts, as well as emotional states that shape meaning and interpretation. Based on these objectives, the research addresses the following questions: (a) Can eco‑advertising be effectively analysed through Relevance Theory? and (b) How can eco‑advertisements be examined using an extension of the communicative elements presented in this study? In this study, we understand these elements as being used in communication, while multimodality is defined here as the strategic combination of these diverse resources to create a richer, more comprehensive, and more cohesive communicative experience. The results confirm that Relevance Theory is a robust framework for analysing the audiovisual genre. This theory provides tools to analyse both explicit content and implicit, weak, or non‑propositional effects in visual and auditory messages. Action and emotional effects capture information about the attitudes and emotions of the speaker/writer in relation to the explanation they have communicated. We cannot claim to fully understand a speaker’s or writer’s message if we do not correctly understand the attitudes and emotions that he or she intends to convey. I claim, all communication is inherently multimodal.