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

RECANTING ERRORS, ASSERTING TRUTHS: IDEOLOGY AND MODALITY IN ABIEZER COPPE’S “COPP’S RETURN TO THE WAYES OF TRUTH”

The article proposes a pragmatic-stylistic analysis of modality and ideology in Abiezer Coppes Coppes Return to the Wayes of Truth(1651), a dramatic recantation written in prison by one of the most (in-)famous radical thinkers of England during the Interregnum. As the analysis will try to show, the peculiar features of this text and its complex communicative strategies call for a wider variety of methodological tools, complementing the application of code-driven models for the analysis of modality with more use-driven pragmatic and stylistic frameworks. In Coppes text, textual and contextual elements are as fundamental as code and grammatical aspects to convey evaluation, and they trigger a very sly conflict between overt and covert meanings, producing interstitial, ironical, even subversive reading possibilities, thus demonstrating how modality is inextricably tied to a variety of linguistic devices to produce a multifaceted message