This stage of the journey moves to ‘things speakers do with language’ in communication, covering a broad area from the literal-non-literal distinction and approaches to metaphor, through speech acts, ending with the ‘crossroads’ with ethical and social debates, such as those to do with negotiation and joint construction of meaning, questions of accountability and commitment (also in the case of lying and misleading), as well as politeness and appropriateness, including the use of taboo and offensive language. It offers a glimpse of how these topics benefit from an interdisciplinary manner of research and pauses with ample ‘food for thought’ questions on the way.

I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

Being as the most fundamental intentional state. Being as a matter of “being-there,” where the “there” is determined by metaphors. Sovereign states and sovereign individuals in early modern Europe. The uncertain ontological status of both subjects. Theater and theory as ways to make both subjects beholdable and indisputably there. Dance as a way to come into being. Social ontologies based on dance metaphors – the world-stage and the social interaction of resident ambassadors.

Ponton and Canepa examine metaphor use in texts from the Cambridge Law Journal. However, the authors do not approach metaphor from a conceptual viewpoint but regard it as a component of good verbal style in the Aristotelean sense, as a figure of speech being of vital constitutive importance in legal discourse.

Gregoriou presents a study of characterisation in a crime fiction novel on child trafficking. Her choice of analytic tools (speech presentation, naming strategies, transitivity, modality and metaphor analysis) narrows the focus to an in-depth exploration of these selected five, bringing to light character Muna’s mind style.

In this chapter we take a closer look at figurative language from a pragmatic perspective. Figurative language is also often associated with literary language. However, as we shall see, from a pragmatic perspective, non-literal use of language extends far beyond the devices and tropes traditionally associated with rhetoric and poetry. The inferential processes that we employ to interpret metaphors, irony, and other figuratively used language, are part of a more general pragmatic system. Non-literal use of language is pervasive, and the processing of non-literal language plays a central role in utterance interpretation. We focus on metaphor, hyperbole, and irony, outlining several of the most influential pragmatic approaches to the analyses of these and starting with the Gricean account. The field of lexical pragmatics is introduced, and a range of examples are discussed to illustrate just how often we use language ‘loosely’. This approach is then applied to approximations, hyperbole, and metaphor. In the second half of the chapter, attention turns to irony, and two leading analyses are introduced and then compared: irony as pretence and irony as echoic use.

This chapter explores ways in which interpreting literature might inform biblical interpretation through the metaphors used to describe the relationship between the two and reading in general.

This chapter highlights passages from Darwin’s early writings that explore phonetics and phonology in the natural world, illuminating how sound lies at the heart of Darwin’s observational methodology. Darwin’s handwritten notes and early manuscripts, for example, demonstrate that his writing process relies upon experiencing the sonic texture and physiological dimension of nature. In order to communicate this sonic texture, Darwin uses elaborate metaphors and descriptions to recreate his own auditory experience within the mind’s eye (or ear) of his readers, in a process of auditory ekphrasis. Darwin’s attempts to represent birdsong, as well as his admittedly imperfect attempts to compare the sounds of a variety of animals, informed his understanding of the boundaries that differentiated species from each other. Ultimately, Darwin’s approaches to labeling sound at the intersection of different physiological, behavioral, and cultural registers exemplify the productive nature of a sound studies methodology in Victorian studies and beyond.

Transition, understood as transformation and displacement, defines early Latin American textualities, where forms of rhetoric, genres, loci of enunciation are crossed within the cultural quagmire of conquest and the colonial order. This process leads to the difficult coexistence of the archaic and the new, tradition and rupture that become evident in the emergence of a new configuration of identities that shed light on “entrelugares” (in-between spaces), which become the foundation of the Latin American literary tradition. This essay proposes four textual figures that delimit new identities: the soldier-conqueror, the translator-migrant, the plebeian, and the woman chronicler. These figures are studied in a range of sixteenth-century texts including chronicles, histories, letters, and reports from New Spain, Peru, and Río de la Plata.

This chapter investigates the role that clichés play in the construction and articulation of face and entrepreneurial identity by examining transcripts from broadcast discourse TV show The Apprentice. Utilising insights from self-presentation theory, face theory and im/politeness, the chapter analyses a number of extracts from the show featuring clichés to explore what identities are construed by clichés and how they construe the participants’ (desired or actual) entrepreneurial identity. The first level of analysis explores the way in which clichés work ideationally as choices the speakers make to construe the version of the identity they wish to perform at the point of filming, known as single articulation. The second level of analysis discusses the juxtaposition between the interpersonal function clichés fulfil in the self-presentation extracts and in the representation of such self-presentation, known as double articulation.

This chapter conceptualises clichés as socio-cognitive representations in advertising and branding discourse. It draws on social cognition and argues that clichés are useful resources for the construction of brand identity. Two current UK print advertisements and a corpus of UK corporate mission statements are analysed combining corpus linguistics tools and textual analysis of cliches and their collocates using tools from SFL’s transitivity system, social actor theory, appraisal theory and conceptual metaphor theory. The findings demonstrate that, ideationally, cliches are used to construe an ideal self for the brand evoking models of superiority, difference and wholeness and interpersonally building a relationship of trust with the customer or stakeholder who is the ultimate addressee of the mission statements.

Despite its enduring strength, the Roman tradition has become unreadable in the twenty-first century. Conventional civil war tropes, however, are consistent and clear. While a narrative about citizen armies clashing against each other on the battlefield accords with the Latin concept – civil war derives from bellum civile – Roman literature figures civil discord as a matter of the heart. Fratricide, suicide, rape, rent marriages, incest, falling in love with the enemy all speak to the violence of same on same that makes civil war not just a matter of formal warfare, but a symptom of the collapse of the social bond. Although the protagonists in civil war narratives are male, the women they love or betray threaten to take over their stories.

Vergil’s ambivalence toward the Augustan renewal sets the stage. His overt celebration of an end to civil war and a new age of imperial expansion, which will direct Roman militarism outward, runs counter to the metaphorical register of both the Georgics and the Aeneid. Rome’s history, from the beginning, into the future, is figured as a struggle, only ever partially successful, to contain internal violence. The tension between his integrative and disintegrative gestures is formative for the Roman tradition.

The introduction briefly summarizes the contrasts between traditional views about mind and communication, including the computer and code metaphors. It summarizes the central perspective of the book, that human communication is embodied in a biological sense, as well as in a social and cultural sense, and briefly explains the meaning of these terms. It presents a case for conceptual clarity as a basis for critiquing conventional terminology based on computer and code metaphors, and proposes a more direct and accurate set of terms.