The sick can conceptualize their suffering individually and in a community by subordinating themselves to the rules of the discourse that regulates thinking and behavior. Conceptualization can, therefore, be the result of choice, adopting a particular perspective, and filtering experience through categories that make up a specific ideological or axiological system. It is not only the result of somatic, cultural, or subcultural determination. Research conducted worldwide has already shown that conceptual metaphors help individual patients cope with suffering, mobilize them to fight, and even give them hope. Research on religious communities online has already mapped the community-forming potential of groups of the sick. However, so far, the two trends have not met. The authors of this article try to fill these gaps in the literature by using an intuitive analysis of metaphors as part of the discourse analysis of the digital edition of the Polish monthly Apostolstwo Chorych [Apostolate of the Sick] in 2019-2022. The results of the analysis allow us to understand the community that creates the monthly magazine in its ideological and axiological dimensions. Moreover, the results help capture the connections between the conceptual processes of metaphorizing suffering and the community experience. The conducted research constitutes a contribution to further research on religious communities online, as well as on the metaphors, axiology, and pragmatics of discourses about illness, suffering, and death.

This article aims at exploring the (im/)politeness strategies developed in Supreme Courts’ judgments and opinions. For this purpose, various politeness tokens ranging from sharedness markers and approximators to hedging devices and boosters are taken into account. Multi-words such as “you know”, “you see”, “I mean”, “I think”, “kind of” and “please” or “thank you” are analysed in three different corpora. The corpora considered are the following ones: a corpus composed of the judgements of the UK Supreme Court’s; a corpus of the opinions of the US Supreme Court’s, and a corpus of the decisions of the European Court of Justice. The multi-words’ relative frequencies are compared across the corpora and sample phrases are extracted and analysed in detail. In this way, politeness strategies and pragmatic usages come to the fore. The paper findings reveal different distributions of relative frequencies, where the corpus of the ECJ shows the fewest occurrences. The paper also highlights various pragmatic strategies that often go beyond the politeness intents described in the literature. For example, corpus analysis brings to the surface stance markers in reformulation devices or (apparent) hedges, as well as cohesive elements in approximators. Markers of (negative) impoliteness are found in new-information tokens.

This article explores the strategies by which three world leaders induce people’s cooperation in their COVID-19 addresses. The study examines how leaders exploit banal nationalism to evoke people’s solidarity and cooperation. The data comprised three addresses delivered upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic by Queen Elizabeth, President Trump, and King Salman bin Abdul Aziz. The critical analysis revealed that the two Western leaders, Queen Elizabeth and President Trump, exploited nationalism to generate solidarity and elicit cooperation from their people, using some strategies that align with Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and other strategies that go beyond banality. On the other hand, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, representing a non-Western approach in this study, avoided evoking nationalistic emotions and established a social, familial relationship with all groups of society. The study discusses how nationalistic strategies may have resulted in polarizing and excluding subgroups of society. The analysis also revealed that leaders may distance people instead of affiliating with them to construct a powerful image.

Abstract The following qualitative study focuses on the metaphors of coming out in the Polish language. Native Polish speakers were asked to define coming out and then describe their coming out experiences. Data from 94 participants were analysed. The results from the analysis show that, consistently with the previous study on English data (Dyrmo, 2022b), coming out metaphors are based on several different conceptual structures and meaning foci, for example the image schema of FORCE and CONTAINER, the concept of openness and visibility, the domain of MOVEMENT and TRANSFER, the frame of SHARING AN OBJECT and two discursively oriented metaphorical scenarios: COMING OUT IS MAKING YOUR ORIENTATION VISIBLE TO OTHERS and COMING OUT IS SHIFTING A HEAVY OBJECT OFF YOUR SHOULDERS. The present analysis lays ground for further multimodal analyses of coming out metaphors.

Abstract Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical anchor for this study, express the role of language, culture and cognition in the construal and expression of human experiences. The approaches posit that the metaphorical use of language by an individual or group is shaped by their ideological orientation, knowledge of their natural and social world, and their cultural worldview. This study investigates the metaphorical use of language by the Nigerian print media in their attempts to express ideation on corruption in the Nigerian public sector. There has not been any deliberate and rigorous attempt to study the metaphorical representation of corruption in the Nigerian media discourse, hence this study aims at addressing the lacuna. Thus, this study uses insights from CMT and CL to identify, classify and analyse some of these metaphors in six Nigerian newspapers, namely; The Guardian, Punch, Daily Trust, The Nation, Vanguard and The Sun. The study shows that print media reports of corruption in Nigeria involving powerful social actors such as politicians, government appointees, career civil servants, academics, the military, the media and others have often used metaphorical frames that emanate from the domains of disease, war and conflict, enmity, impediment to movement, violent natural forces, monstrosity, among others, to describe the incidence, scope, effects and consequences of public sector corruption in Nigeria.

Abstract Nuclear stress (or sentence stress) as a prosodic feature marks information flow in spoken English, and has received some treatment in the linguistics literature, most notably in pragmatics, but less so in newer phonological paradigms. Current theories in linguistics might shed light on this feature, such as Optimality Theory (OT) and cognitive grammar (CG). This paper compares potential insights and likely predictions of these two approaches for nuclear stress, by examining a recorded conversation of native US English speakers. The descriptive statistics indicate stress pattern distributions as expected, and some stress tokens show particular pragmatic and discourse functions of nuclear stress. The OT framework can better explain the interaction of different levels of prosody, grammar, and information structure, while CG might offer a more holistic explanation of stress, and its sociopragmatic and discourse functions, and may thus be likely more applicable to discourse studies, applied linguistics, and pedagogy. Implications are discussed for a CG theory of prosodic phonology, and for L2 pedagogy.

Abstract This study identifies, analyses and describes the devices and functions of focus in information structuring in Hadiyya, a Highland East Cushitic language. Data, which were collected from native speakers, were dealt with based on the theory of Functional Grammar (Dik 1997). For focalization, the language uses morphological, lexical and syntactic means. The latter involves word-order change and cleft construction (including pseudo-cleft). Comparatively, the morphological mechanism is the most dynamic and frequent in use while the lexical means is limited both in the number of items employed and in frequency of occurrence.

Abstract This paper examines the linguistic means by which spatial relations are expressed in Dagbani, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in the northern region of Ghana (West Africa). I pay particular attention to the grammar of Dagbani “postpositions” demonstrating that the system of locative expressions comprises words that share heterosemic relations with some body parts and landmark terms. I show that although these locative expressions are related both segmentally and suprasegmentally to the nominal items they might have developed from, they are distinct in terms of their semantic, syntactic and morphological properties. Consequently, I conclude that the body-part nouns in locative constructions are distinct syntactic categories due to the morphosyntactic and semantic differences they exhibit. These body-part nouns are thus analysed as grammaticalized items, which function as postpositions and instantiate a postpositional phrase (PostP) category. Finally, I propose possible series of semantic changes that could account for the development of the body-part terms as postpositions.

Abstract The article presents the results of a study of functional, semantic and chronological issues concerning Middle English occupational terms with Scandinavian word stems. The semantic group under investigation consists of 184 words, comprising 24.5% of the total number of loan-blends within the semantic group of Middle English occupational terms, and 8% of the total 2,417 Middle English occupational terms. 97 loan-blends with Scandinavian word stems were revealed on the basis of proper names. They constitute 13% of all Middle English occupational terms. a predominance of the function of identification and a very active usage with the aim of identifying people in medieval society prove loan-blends with Scandinavian word stems to be very popular. The data obtained in the study prove the very high level of popularity of Scandinavian borrowings in Middle English, as well as a prevalence of the names of artisans among all the semantic groups of the word stems. We noted an increase in the number of derivatives first attested in the 13th and the 14th centuries, whereas a decrease in the process of word formation on the basis of Scandinavian borrowings is noticed in the 15th century.

Abstract The anonymous peer review is an unpublished pre-publication review which evaluates research articles submitted to journals. This type of a review plays a special role in the genre landscape of Anglophone research by ensuring its appropriate quality and ethical standards. By performing this role, the peer review also realizes a didactic potential, as it motivates researchers to improve their investigations. This paper extends the existing research on the anonymous peer review and aims to deepen our understanding of this genre by analysing the overall functional organization of peer review texts and their prominent linguistic features shaped by three communicative functions ‒ “gatekeeping”, evaluative, and didactic. It also attempts to compare the characteristics of peer reviews in two research fields ideologically and epistemologically distant from each other ‒ applied linguistics and applied mathematics. The methodological framework of the study combines Swales’s move analysis and a functional stylistic perspective developed within the East European linguistic context. The analysis has revealed a three-move structure of review texts and disclosed the roles of interpersonal markers, evaluative lexis and four types of directives in the realization of the communicative functions of the genre. The typologies of reviewers’ comments and evaluative acts in reviews have also been suggested. Furthermore, the study has brought to light some quantitative and qualitative differences between the texts in two disciplines. It is anticipated that awareness of the linguistic conventions of anonymous peer reviews analysed in the paper will help researchers to perceive this genre as a valuable source of professional assistance and enlightenment.