This paper considers a range of so-called image macro Internet memes and describes them as emerging multimodal constructions relying as much on image as on text, and apportioning roles to images much like constructional slots, for instance to fill in a subject role in a subjectless clause, or even to provide the main clause content to a textually given when-clause. In addition to existing or partially altered linguistic constructions, many examples also rely on specific top text/bottom text division of labor, and crucially depend on frame metonymy, with limited formal means quickly cueing richly detailed frames (for instance by using iconic images). The popularity of memes, forming series and cycles of iterations and remixes, and their role in establishing and maintaining discourse communities seems to be driven by a need to express and reconstrue viewpoints, often starting from ideas, affects or stereotypes assumed to be intersubjectively shared with viewers, whose responses they solicit. This paper argues that a proper description of Internet memes of the type considered requires a construction grammar approach, complemented by an understanding of viewpoint dynamics in terms of a Discourse Viewpoint Space regulating the network of spaces and viewpoints.
This book offers a new and in-depth analysis of English conditional sentences. In a wide-ranging discussion, Dancygier classifies conditional constructions according to time-reference and modality. She shows how the basic meaning parameters of conditionality correlate to formal parameters of the linguistic constructions which are used to express them. Dancygier suggests that the function of prediction is central to the definition of conditionality, and that conditional sentences display certain formal features which correlate to aspects of interpretation. Although the analysis is based primarily on English, it provides a theoretical framework that can be extended cross-linguistically to a broad range of grammatical phenomena. It will be essential reading for scholars and students concerned with the role of conditionals in English and many other languages.
Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly described conditional constructions. They explore theoretical issues such as the mental-space-building processes underlying conditional thinking and the form-meaning relationship involved in expressing conditionality. Using a broad range of attested English conditional constructions, the book examines inter-constructional relationships. Within the framework of Mental Spaces Theory, shared parameters of meaning are shown to be relevant to conditional constructions generally, as well as related temporal and causal constructions. This significant contribution to the field will be welcomed by a wide range of researchers in theoretical and cognitive linguistics.
This article 1 applies the framework of conceptual integration (or blending) theory (as developed by Fauconnier and Turner) to the analysis of several travel narratives by Jonathan Raban. The primary goal of the article is to show how the analysis of blending strategies used in the text may help in the recognition of the specific features of a writer's narrative style. An extensive discussion of a variety of blends appearing in Raban's texts also serves as a background to the discussion of the relation between choices of blending strategies and the allocation of narrative viewpoint. It is argued that the concept of narrative viewpoint crucially relies on the structure of blending networks. Finally, it is shown how interpretation of viewpoint phenomena in the narrative builds on the mechanism termed viewpoint compression.
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