A Cross-Cultural Study of Commercial Media Discourses

Book excerpt: This book decodes commercial news discourses from the perspective of cognitive semantics. It attaches considerable importance to the bodily experientialism and linguistic embodiment advocated in discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics and explores the complex yet thought-provoking correlation between overt language and covert cognition by focusing on contrastive analyses of metaphors, image schemas, and stance markers in texts. On the basis of the analyses, the author discusses the linguistic applications, lexical devices and personal experiences, along with their embodied mechanisms, revealing the linguistic strategies, embodied cognitive linguistic actions and constructive thoughts used in media discourses on product promotion, human resources deployment, and commodity problem resolution. In turn, this sheds light on how linguistic selections and cognitive mechanisms are used in composing media news and on how public cognition on certain social and business issues might be framed. The combination of cognitive semantics and commercial discourse analysis offers comprehensive and rewarding insights into the cross-cultural research of both cognitive actions and linguistic behavior reflected in news reports and highlights the correlation between the use of wording and cognitive construction in discourses, which broadens the scope of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Further, the use of analytical measures and the effective integration of discourse analysis and cognitive semantics lend the book additional analytical authenticity, providing an empirical foundation for cross-cultural communication studies.