Going Beyond the Literal: a Longitudinal Study of Metaphorical Conceptualization in Sustainability Reports

Language expressions are largely shaped by conceptual metaphors By adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory as a tool this study explores the communicative strategies adopted by a company s outlook on social and environmental responsibility from a longitudinal perspective In more specific terms the article discusses how Structural Orientational and Ontological conceptual metaphors are employed in the communicative strategies adopted by Chevron Co pre- and during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis Chevron is an American join-stock company which operates in the field of power generation and oil refining The qualitative and quantitative li nguistic analysis conducted using the Sketch Engine programme aimed to pinpoint and clarify the ways in which Chevron and Co s use of language creates and communicates metaphors in its Sustainability Report

Going beyond the Literal: A Longitudinal Study of Metaphorical Conceptualization in Sustainability Reports

Language expressions are primarily shaped by conceptual metaphors. By adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory as a tool, this study explores the communicative strategies adopted by a company’s outlook on social and environmental responsibility from a longitudinal perspective. Conceptual Metaphor theory, also known as Cognitive Metaphor Theory, is an expression used in cognitive linguistics to describe the understanding of one notion or conceptual domain in terms of another. In more specific terms, the article discusses how Structural, Orientational, and Ontological conceptual metaphors are employed in the communicative strategies adopted by Chevron & Co. pre- and during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Chevron is an American joint-stock company that operates in the field of power generation and oil refining. The qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis conducted using the Sketch Engine program aimed to pinpoint and clarify the ways in which Chevron and Co’s use of language creates and communicates metaphors in its Sustainability Report

Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Rhetorical Strategies of Persuasion: A Longitudinal Study of Transitivity and Ergativity in the Rhetoric of Saras’ Sustainability Reports

This study explores the correlation between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as tools for analysing the evolution of rhetoric in the communicative strategies adopted in a company’s Reports on social and environmental responsibility. In more specific terms, Transitivity and Ergativity—concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) —through the lenses of CDA, are employed as a theoretical means for the analysis of a longitudinal study in the communicative strategies employed by Saras SpA pre- and during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Saras is an Italian joint-stock company operating in oil refining and power generation. The qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis carried out using Sketch Engine software, aims to identify and explain how rhetoric is built and presented through language use in Saras SpA Sustainability Reports. Specific focus is given to communication strategies towards local and global communities and stakeholders in the years immediately before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. The rationale behind the study lies in the fact that 2020 and 2021 have been among the most difficult years since the end of World War II. Lives were abruptly turned upside down by the pandemic, which had grave negative effects on people’s health and on the economy. The result has been a threefold crisis involving health, the economy and social tension, with the refining sector being one of the hardest hit, since the oil refining industry was one of the most affected industries due to the general reduction in mobility and oil consumption brought about by the virus-fighting measures. Emphasis is placed on the construction of rhetorical strategies pre- and during the pandemic crisis using the representational process of Transitivity and Ergativity, thus revealing the close relationship between the use language in terms of grammatical configuration encoded and semantic roles of syntactic transformation on the one hand, and rhetorical assumptions on the other. The results show that linguistic decisions regarding Transitivity and Ergativity choices play a crucial role in how effective writing achieves its rhetorical aims in terms of extending and maintaining dominant and implicit ideologies and underlying persuasive actions, and that some rhetorical motivation is perpetuated—if not actually overtly or subtly strengthened—in social-environmental Reports issued in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis

Pain and its management in thalassaemia

Oral presentation is available onlin

Drawing Humanitarian Communication as Performativity: Visual Design of the Tigray Refugee Situation on the UN Refugee Agency UK Website

This article outlines the discursive construction of the refugee situation in Ethiopia’s Tigray region by examining photographs found on the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHRC) United Kingdom website. The purpose is to discern humanitarian aid communication discourse not simply for its informational value, support (Chouliaraky 2017). Multimodal CDA and social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 1999; Kress and van Leeuwen 2017) were employed in order to break down visual communication into elements, and to systematically reveal the performative practice of meaning in relation to the categories of settings, the represented participants, actions, angles, and proxemics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted in order to determine the number of photos with a given feature. By highlighting the plight of those forcibly displaced and emphasising their uniqueness and personal experiences - in contrast to the dehumanised massified representation found in western media (Chouliaraky 2017; Adi and Cheregi 2015) -, the phenomenon of their forced fleeing from Tigray is humanised. In line with Bellander (2021), the UNHRC is constructed as being trustworthy and actionable, and refugees are clearly depicted as being in urgent need of support. Visitors to the UK website are invited to feel they are involved with the life of the refugees and morally engaged in “the work performed by the organization” (Bellander 2021: 310). By means of the combination of specific affection drawing on discourses of morality, solidarity and ethical equality, the overall images provide “the symbolic conditions under which we are invited to imagine the predicament of these sufferers” (Chouliaraky 2017: 5) and in so doing to appeal to a force that will work towards a practical push towards action

Troubled images: analysing the republican use of visual metaphors in wall paintings and pictures in Northern Ireland

The republican movement in Northern Ireland was visually manifested in images drawn on walls and on the gable ends of houses in the towns of Belfast and (London) Derry. As well as being an iconographic expression of the social injustice they suffered (Rapp & Rhomberg, 2013; Goalwin, 2013), these wall paintings were employed by the republicans to convey political and ideological messages in order to heighten awareness and to mobilize people. Blank spaces on walls were increasingly exploited by republican groups and were converted into a visual medium sui generis for their political and ideological claims and demands. Over the years republicans developed this novel communication strategy geared to expressing highly emotional content that served to reflect and influence the sentiments of the communities involved in the conflict. It also served to channel collective memory, recording key events and contributing to the formation of an identity. Intense political disagreements and armed conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities from 1968 to 1998 led to violent clashes during the period known as “the Troubles”. This complicated time frame has been metaphorically represented in various ways in wall paintings and posters in Northern Ireland. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political and ideological use of visual metaphors in the images of the republican movement during the “Troubles”. More specifically, by applying the most recent methodological tool derived from a socio-cognitive model of discourse analysis, namely Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), the purpose is to analyse, both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view, the three different types of Conceptual Metaphorical Schemas: Propositional, Image and Event Schema (Soares da Silva, 2016)

Pathogen Inactivation. New Progress

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (by-nc 3.0) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited [...

Communicating Europe: a social semiotic approach

The failure of the referenda in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005 plunged the EU into its deepest and most serious crisis since its foundation. During the ‘period of reflection’ declared by the European Council in June 2005, EU institutions clearly recognized the need to understand this lack of democratic legitimacy in terms of communicative action, thus paving the way ‘to close the gap’ with citizens and face this sense of alienation felt from Brussels. In addition, the recent trend of globalization has had a great impact on a variety of different domains; the result being that the contemporary world has been fostering the formation of a corporate-model to increase profit-making opportunities. The paper sets out to investigate the diachronic changes of the rhetorical and pragmatic linguistic strategies from the point of view of «the key dimensions of social semiotics» (van Leeuwen 2005: 91), namely discourse, genre and style, and uncover displacement of «communicative» practices with «strategic action» (Habermas 1987: 333), which in turn entails a purely instrumental rationale. In particular, EU discourse pre- and post- the referendum fiasco is investigated in terms of how it constructs representations of the social world and the EU political and institutional process itself; how it contributes as a means of EU institutional process; and how it conveys a particular EU identity connected to particular values.The failure of the referenda in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005 plunged the EU into its deepest and most serious crisis since its foundation. During the ‘period of reflection’ declared by the European Council in June 2005, EU institutions clearly recognized the need to understand this lack of democratic legitimacy in terms of communicative action, thus paving the way ‘to close the gap’ with citizens and face this sense of alienation felt from Brussels. In addition, the recent trend of globalization has had a great impact on a variety of different domains; the result being that the contemporary world has been fostering the formation of a corporate-model to increase profit-making opportunities. The paper sets out to investigate the diachronic changes of the rhetorical and pragmatic linguistic strategies from the point of view of «the key dimensions of social semiotics» (van Leeuwen 2005: 91), namely discourse, genre and style, and uncover displacement of «communicative» practices with «strategic action» (Habermas 1987: 333), which in turn entails a purely instrumental rationale. In particular, EU discourse pre- and post- the referendum fiasco is investigated in terms of how it constructs representations of the social world and the EU political and institutional process itself; how it contributes as a means of EU institutional process; and how it conveys a particular EU identity connected to particular values