Cognition, Communication, Discourse

Symbols in brand storytelling

Alla Belova — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:13:51 +0000

The article highlights the role of symbols in digital storytelling that is becoming an effective marketing strategy. Digital technologies made storytelling on websites and social media platforms multimedia and multimodal and opening up new creativity horizons. The research is based on the analysis of storytelling of famous jewelry maisons – Cartie, Tiffany, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, Harry Winston – on their websites. These brands creations are symbols of obsession, of great dreams, idée fixe for millions of people. Stories have become an essential component of textual and visual information on the websites thus providing access to the brand history, timeline, heritage and values for the wider, global audience. Luxury brands’ logos are easily recognized symbols associated with exclusive design, unrivalled creativity, refined taste, high social status. Culture-specific symbols pertaining to different civilizations are efficiently integrated into jewelry design. Some creations become emblematic of the maisons and symbolize the brands. Jewelry pieces of luxury brands can turn into symbols – magical elements of flora and fauna, cosmos, human world. The maisons prescribe symbolic value to their creations in their advertising and marketing campaigns. Symbols turn out to be pivotal for meaning making in the storytelling techniques, both visually and textually, spanning the most important facts of the brands founders’ personal and professional lives, the history of the brand, acquisition of unique gemstones and creation of iconic jewelry items that become the milestones in the brands' development. The stories about the brands and their creations visualize symbols. Culture-relevant symbols are aptly integrated into jewelry pieces design and visualized in multiplе stories on official websites. High Jewelry items and luxury jewelry items become brand-specific symbols. Luxury brands creations become iconic and might symbolize nature world, cosmos, human life and activities. Symbolic storytelling is interlaced with complicated cognitive and semiotic processes, interdiscursivity, diverse implications what makes meaning making and decoding more sophisticated and fascinating.

Multimodal and cognitive approaches to academic discourse in AI-supported learning

Ella Dovhaniuk, Alexander Piwowar, Natalya Oliynyk — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:45:09 +0000

This article examines how academic discourse is reshaped in higher education through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and multimodal design, understood here in the sense of multimodal discourse theory (not multimodal AI models). Grounded in cognitive linguistics, sociocognitive discourse theory and multimodal semiotics, the study analyzes how academic concepts are structured and communicated in AI-enhanced learning environments. It focuses on two Micromodules developed at the University of Osnabrück – Welcome to the AI Jungle and Expedition AI. Micromodules are short multimedia units suitable for Blended Learning that integrate text, visuals, interactivity, and AI-generated feedback within the Stud.IP Learning Management System (LMS). Using a combination of cognitive discourse analysis and multimodal content analysis, the study explores how learners engage with the concepts of learning, argumentation, and autonomy in AI-mediated contexts.

Our findings show that learners navigate content using conceptual metaphors like LEARNING IS A JOURNEY, reinforced by modular layout and AI feedback mechanisms. Argumentation is shaped through additive elaboration rather than critical opposition, while autonomy is bounded by interface cues and AI prompts. The study also analyzes how AI systems – specifically tailored to and embedded within the LMS – can participate as semiotic agents, influencing meaning-making through tone, visual presence, and structured interaction. These patterns suggest a shift toward dialogic, hybrid academic discourse in which agency is distributed across human and non-human actors. The article argues that in AI-supported, multimodal learning environments, academic literacy should be reimagined as something created through collaboration between students, educators, and digital tools. It also highlights that developing critical digital literacy is essential for designing curricula that meet the demands of the future.

Prototype dynamics in the Restoration vernacular print: A diachronic onomastic study of Poor Robin’s Almanack

Anna Karaban — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This study quantifies the internal semantics of the mock-saint calendars that appeared annually in Poor Robin’s Almanack between 1664 and 1674, the most widely circulated comic almanac of Restoration London. From ten digitized issues a corrected onomastic corpus of 2728 tokens was compiled; every name is time-stamped by month and year, classified under one of eight narrative roles — Heroes & Knights, Lovers, Magic & Supernatural, Notorious Women, Outlaws & Rogues, Sages & Satirists, Tricksters & Fools, and Tyrants & Traitors — and tagged for cultural provenance (Greek myth, broadside ballad, contemporary pamphlet, etc.). Token frequency serves as an historical production norm; the category concentration and intra-class typicality translate that frequency into prototype strength. Results reveal a graded folk taxonomy. Lovers and Heroes & Knights form tight, myth-anchored nuclei dominated by a handful of classical and romance figures, whereas Tricksters & Fools and Tyrants & Traitors display deliberately flat profiles open to continual topical additions. Provenance tags show a strong correlation between lexical concentration and cultural homogeneity: categories with high concentration draw most of their tokens from a single narrative pool, while diffuse categories recruit names from five or more source domains. Diachronically, the calendar’s centre of gravity first shifts toward political invective, then toward jest-book humor, quantifying how popular print renegotiates the sacred–profane boundary in step with shifting political climates and the taste for novelty. Methodologically, the article demonstrates that fixed-format onomastic satire can be mined much like production norms: name extraction, semantic tagging, prototype metrics and diachronic slicing together provide an alternative for historical cognitive linguistics.

Meta-cognition on AI: What students think about using AI for academic purposes

Almut Ketzer-Nöltge, Antje Rüger — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 09:31:27 +0000

There is currently a broad debate concerning the application of AI-based tools in academic contexts, particularly in the domain of academic writing of students, as well as concerning the AI-related skills necessary for these pursuits (cf. Long & Magerko, 2020). The utilization of Generative AI (genAI), underpinned by Large Language Models (LLM), holds considerable promise in facilitating academic processes, particularly for students to whom the language of academic study is not their first language (L1). A cross-sectional survey of students at German universities (von Garrel & Mayer, 2023) revealed that approximately two-thirds of respondents were already using genAI-based tools in the 2022/23 winter term, but only a quarter did so (very) frequently. Similar studies have primarily yielded a series of discrete snapshots of genAI utilization in academia. A notable limitation of these studies is the absence of any distinction between L1 and L2 students. The survey we conducted focuses on potential group differences between students with German as L1 and German as L2 and also aims to track developments in the use of tools based on genAI, knowledge about genAI, and attitudes toward genAI in the first years of the general availability of genAI-tools (2023-2025). To this end, a total of 143 questionnaires from students of various degree programs (primarily German as a Foreign and Second Language) from the University of Leipzig encompassing a period of two years are evaluated. The results of the survey presented in this paper concentrate on the students’ awareness of and disposition towards genAI / LLM (but see Ketzer-Nöltge & Rüger, in press, for complementary results).

Translation as gestalt

Alla Martynyuk, Dinara Huliieva — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:26:57 +0000

This article aims to integrate theoretical and methodological affordances of translation studies and cognitive linguistics to introduce a holistic methodology of translation analysis, which is based on the interpretation of the translated linguistic expression as one of the interconnected linguistic and non-linguistic (audio-visual and visual) exponents of a general gestalt meaning, which is constructed with the participation of all possible dimensions of the context: both linguistic (semantic-syntactic) and extralinguistic (situational and socio-cultural). The proposed procedure for translation analysis includes: 1) a description of the situational and socio-cultural context in which the action/event, actualized by the analysed verbal-visual utterance, takes place; 2) clarification of the contribution all the interconnected lexical-phraseological and grammatical, as well as visual exponents make into the construction of the gestalt meaning of the original and translated utterances. The application of the proposed methodology to the analysis of the subtitling of Sherlock Holmes' speech in the British mini-series Sherlock revealed a tendency to preserve rational propositional content while losing modal emotional-evaluative shades of meaning, which is manifested in: 1) simplification of the syntactic structure of the original speech, which, however, does not reduce the accuracy of the reproduction of the rational propositional content; 2) refusal to translate particles and modal verbs that complicate the predicate and participate in constructing certainty degrees of deductive assumptions, as well as irony and sarcasm, which is partially compensated by the visuals and the soundtrack; 3) preservation of the illustrative correspondence of the image and speech, but the loss of verbal-visual puns due to the use of Ukrainian equivalents, which holistically rethink the referential situation, reflecting its meaning, but consist of words of completely different semantics compared to the original.

Multimodal simile in internet memes on X responding to the 2024 U.S. presidential election

Olga Meleshchenko, Olena Radchenko — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores how multimodal similes are construed in internet memes on the X platform responding to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, a multimodal simile is defined as a simile in which the source and target domains are cued in different modes. The study analyzes four representative memes that prompt figurative comparisons between verbally and visually cued domains. Captured in the X is like Y format, multimodal similes are categorized as either narrow-scope or broad-scope. Narrow-scope examples typically pair emotionally charged images with when- or if-clauses, prompting viewers to map specific emotional or physical states onto abstract experiences. These similes rely on EFFECT-FOR-CAUSE metonymy, mapping vivid, delimited attributes onto the target domain. In contrast, broad-scope similes tend to involve be like-clauses to trigger more complex, dynamic mappings. For instance, one meme mocks Kamala Harris’s electoral loss by comparing her campaign trajectory to the erratic movement of a faulty shopping cart. Another critiques Democratic priorities through a comparison of Democrats with a lone figure celebrating a minor legal victory amid urban devastation. These examples rely on frame metonymy and metaphor to construct satirical political critique. In all cases, humor emerges from the incongruity between incompatible conceptual structures, while the simile serves as both a cognitive mechanism and a communication strategy. The findings suggest that, despite being often overshadowed by metaphor in cognitive-linguistic research, a multimodal simile has substantial rhetorical power, exploiting the affordances of verbal and visual modes to forge figurative links across disparate conceptual domains.

Identify dynamics in Frédéric Beigbeder’s novels: A synergetic analysis

Bohdan Paramonov — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:49:01 +0000

The article explores the concept of identity in Frédéric Beigbeder’s autofictional and autobiographical novels through the prism of synergetics, self-organised systems and meta-metaphor. By analysing the writer’s works, including trilogies about Marc Marronier and Octave Parango, as well as his autobiographical texts, the study examines how the processes of self-organisation and the interaction of various social, cultural and psychological factors determine the formation and evolution of characters’ identity. The application of the synergetic approach reveals the mechanisms of identity formation through the system of attractors (goals, values, aspirations) and repellers (crisis events, destructive factors), which demonstrates the dynamics of the characters’ self-identification in the conditions of modern socio-cultural changes.

Meta-metaphors in the works by Frédéric Beigbeder play an important role in the construction of layers of meaning, conveying complex aspects of individual and collective self-identification. For example, the arrest in Un roman français symbolises the awareness of his own past, the dam in Un barrage contre l’Atlantique reflects the struggle against destructive natural tendencies, the Tower of Babel in Windows on the World represents globalisation, and the cathedral in Au secours pardon illustrates existential crisis and the search for meaning. In addition, meta-metaphor serves as a way of literary transformation of biographical experience, turning the author’s personal experiences into universal models of identity comprehension.

The results of this study show that Frédéric Beigbeder’s autofictional and autobiographical works are complex multi-layered systems that combine the author’s personal experience with postmodernist writing strategies. His protagonists function as dynamic systems undergoing transformations under the influence of social, cultural and psychological factors. The study highlights the significance of self-organised systems and meta-metaphors in the modelling of identity and opens new perspectives for the analysis of postmodern novels, showing how literature reflects the processes of personal self-determination in a changing world.

Language-specific means of actualization of cognitive-pragmatic potential of evaluation

Ganna Prihodko — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:59:15 +0000

Evaluation covers a wide range of linguistic units across various levels of language structure, the study of which is of particular relevance at the current stage of linguistic inquiry, because the correlation and interaction of semantics and pragmatics have become one of the central issues within contemporary linguistic theory. Evaluation constitutes the essence of linguistic presentation of extralinguistic reality. Language dissects reality, restructures it, and then assigns labels to its constituent elements. Throughout the evolution of the linguistic system, evaluation—manifesting itself in explicit form—has crystallized into specific linguistic units such as affixes, lexemes, and particular syntactic constructions. The present article aims to examine language-specific mechanisms for conveying the pragma-cognitive potential of evaluative meaning.

To date, the regularities underlying the emergence of evaluative vocabulary remain insufficiently investigated; particularly, the factors enabling the expression of evaluative attitudes toward referents through lexical means, as it is the word that conveys the entirety of both denotative and extradenotative content. All lexemes containing evaluative meaning can be categorized into: a) mental-evaluative, in which the evaluation comes not from the heart, but from the mind; b) emotional-evaluative, indicating feelings, usually aroused by objects that are socially appraised in a particular way. However, it must be acknowledged that a clear distinction between mental-evaluative and emotional-evaluative vocabulary is not always easily delineated, as affective expressions often incorporate an underlying cognitive appraisal. Evaluative meaning functions as a specific type of cognitive information transmitted through lexical semantics and encapsulates within the definition of a concept the cognitive framework associated with the corresponding linguistic expression. It is regarded as a macrocomponent of a word’s semantic structure, situated within the pragmatic domain and rendered explicit through interpretive mechanisms, i.e., within the realm of semantics. The diversity of evaluative meanings embedded in lexical structures reflects the multifaceted value-oriented perception of reality, as well as the complex interplay between evaluative and affective dimensions in the cognitive process. At the lexical level, evaluative meaning constitutes the conceptual foundation for both specific judgments and the emotions associated with them. It is best understood as a complex cognitive-pragmatic construct.