Pragmatics and Society - Online First

In 2022, a protest movement in Iran was triggered by the death of a woman who had been arrested for not covering her hair in the way required by the government. The movement spread but was then squashed. Media coverage was intense and showed many images employing visual metaphors and metonymies, often in combination. While there are now many studies analyzing multimodal metaphors in political contexts, no study has, yet, dealt with the metaphors and metonymies used in the media during the 2022 protests. This study uses a framework proposed by Ruiz de Mendoza and colleagues (2002; 2014; 2020), to analyze the structural integration of metaphor and metonymy and their joint role in meaning-making during the protests. The analysis of nine images in social media including Instagram and X reveals that Iranian political groups strategically employed the blending of visual metaphors and metonymies to legitimize their own ideological positions and delegitimize opposing viewpoints. The findings highlight the complex interrelations and interactions between these multimodal devices, demonstrating their critical function in shaping political discourse and communicative intent.

This study employs the local grammar approach to unveil sex differences and their diachronic changes of thanking in contemporary spoken British English. Using data taken from Spoken BNC1994 and Spoken BNC2014, the study found that sex differences do exist and change over time. In particular, the study revealed that in the 1990s male speakers performed thanking more frequently than their female counterparts and that female speakers tended to use formulaic expressions for thanking, which challenges the stereotypical view that women are more polite in their language use. These differences and diachronic changes have been accounted for in terms of (changing) social perceptions of sex roles, communicative conventions and socio-cultural norms. The study concludes that changes in speech act realisations correspond to changes in broader social contexts and as such (diachronic) investigation into speech act realisations could contribute to revealing the (trans)formation of socio-cultural norms in a given society.

Foreign relations law, as a genre that aims to build bridges between domestic and international law, is an understudied field in the studies of language use in legal contexts. Drawing on the method of critical genre analysis and the theory of legal speech acts, this comparative genre-pragmatic study between foreign relations laws of the U.S. and China examines foreign relations law as a master speech act and an intertextual and interdiscursive practice. Through analysis of regulative speech acts as well as the intertextual and interdiscursive elements used by drafters, the findings show that the genre of foreign relations law is an interdiscursive continuum with domestic and international legal discourse at two poles, U.S. foreign relations law leans toward the side of international legal discourse while Chinese foreign relations law demonstrates a defensive domestic law orientation, but their position on the continuum is never static but dynamic.