Conceptual Metaphors and Proverbs as Interactive Communicative Strategies in a XVII-century Ballad

The article analyzes the presence of Conceptual Metaphors (CMs) in a XVII-century ballad in their interaction with popular proverbs as supplementary symbolizing patterns. The article will try to show the complexity of the mental processing involved in a special case of love disputation, in which CMs are made to interact with proverbs in order to produce implicatures. The use of CMs in the text and their interplay with proverbs and popular wisdom produce some unpredictable perlocutionary effects, which are not only significant indicators of the speakers⟠ideology and point of view, but also trigger communicative effects and a âœproliferation of meaningsâ which confirm, or disrupt, certain socially âžinherited⟠conceptual structures both reflecting and shaping the thought patterns of a community

Clipped wings and the great abyss: Cognitive stylistics and implicatures in Abiezer Coppe’s ‘prophetic’ recantation

In this article, two major paradigms within cognitive stylistics, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT), are applied as largely complementary approaches to discuss the scope and implicatures of the central metaphorical image of Copp’s Return to the wayes of Truth (1651), a text written by one of the most famous radical preachers of the Civil War period as a plea to be released from prison. The article will focus on how the linguistic and cultural contexts of Coppe’s prophetic writing, in their interaction with the dynamic conceptual relationships of a conceptual integration network, open up new possibilities of perspectivizing and insinuating radically different meanings and implicatures: the use of blends in Coppe’s text has a direct effect on the structure of the analogies that can be made between mental spaces, thereby triggering new meaning effects, supplementary symbolizing patterns, and unpredictable perlocutionary effects

“The thick and black clouds of Obloquie”: Modality and Point of View in Abiezer Coppe’s ‘A Remonstrance’

This article discusses the interaction between modality, point of view and ideology in Abiezer Coppe’s A Remonstrance (1651), a letter of protestation written in prison by one of the most infamous radical thinkers of England in the 1650’s. Point of view is one the most fruitful topics of stylistic enquiry, in particular in its interaction with modality as carrier of ideological effects, but, as recent studies amply demonstrate, it is advisable to adopt a heuristic methodology integrating a code-driven approach with a use-driven model in order to account for a wider variety of expressive means for the realisation of modality. As this article tries to show, in Coppe’s text this modal function is mainly performed by periodic sentences and digressions, which act as modalizing structures in the text and, together with the creation of weak implicatures, introduce a destabilizing element with clear ideological implications. The stylistic analysis of A Remonstrance shows how this apparently sincere protestation of innocence is in fact a layered, polysemous text that problematizes the idea itself of sincerity, uses a varied set of modalizing elements to convey an alternative point of view, and produces interstitial (even subversive) reading possibilities