The Linguist

28 The Linguist Vol/62 No/3 thelinguist.uberflip.com REVIEWS 'totally' as a marker of emotional highlighting. The final chapter investigates the appropriate transfer of emotional and cultural information in visual images in film and theatre to audio description in Turkish. Language, Expressivity and Cognition offers a wealth of specific examples (mostly in their original languages with English translations) and statistical data, and detailed descriptions of corpus construction and analysis. The scope is wide but nevertheless restricted; for example, there is no consideration of the expressive functions of prosody, and the data consists predominantly of written discourse. All the chapters, in their various ways, provide interesting insights into contemporary language and its role in expressing – and provoking – emotional reactions. Jonathan Marks MCIL The Long Journey of English Peter Trudgill CUP, 2023, 190 pp; ISBN 9781108949576 Paperback £18.99 In their introductory chapter, the editors observe that in contemporary discourses, especially in western cultures, the expressive function of language predominates over the referential, and the emotional 'temperature' is often high. For example, in TV confrontation between participants is valued, and in social media self-expression and emotive evaluation often take precedence over substantive content. The next two chapters study the embodiment of conceptual metaphors in the phrasal lexicons of languages. Hungarian is found to exemplify a dualistic cultural model with the head as a metaphor for rational thinking and the heart for irrational faculties. The heart also appears in expressions concerning memory and understanding – for example, reasonable thinking requires a 'calm heart'. In English, Italian and Polish, conceptual metaphors of emotion regulation and cognitive inhibition arise from mapping emotions and thoughts onto physical objects with which we attempt to limit physical contact – e.g. 'chase away thoughts' (Italian), 'reject an idea' (English), 'break through fear' (Polish). The remaining seven chapters analyse corpora of language from specific contemporary sources. A corpus of Italian news headlines reveals how terms for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers lose their semantic specificity in press discourse, becoming vehicles for framing such people as non-human, non-adult entities lacking individuation, agentivity and intentionality – e.g. 'New wave of refugees'. Where they are portrayed as active participants, it is typically as criminals or in other negatively evaluated roles. Similarly, the following chapter shows that Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini, in tweets and traditional speeches, foster a lack of empathy with immigrants and refugees by framing them as a threat (for example as potential terrorists), an economic burden to the societies they move into or a dangerous force of nature that must be controlled. An investigation of online group identity patterns in English and Polish suggests that Poland, supposedly a more 'collectivistic' culture than the UK, is becoming more individualistic, while the UK moves towards collectivism. In both cultures, though especially in Polish, participants strive to establish online visibility and to identify with a group, but the Polish online comments have a higher emotional temperature, with more insult and denigration, while the UK comments have less abuse and more substantial argumentation. An analysis of reports and commentaries on opinion polls concerning whether vaccination against Covid-19 should be made compulsory in Poland illustrates how lexical choices are used to sway public opinion. An example is the choice between two adjectives (and their related nouns) which both have the broad sense of 'compulsory' – one with the connotation of 'enforced', the other neutral or positively evaluated. The neutral term may, for instance, be used in a poll question but the negatively connotated one in a report on the poll result. The distribution of the unmarked and marked terms correlates with their occurrence in left- and right-leaning sources. A study of Arabic-English code-switching in Egyptian rap music and associated social networks suggests that multilingual speakers do not necessarily use their L1 as the default for expressing emotion; using another language can reduce inhibitions about expressing strong emotions and addressing taboos. A comparison of American and British TV teen dramas shows evidence of synchronic and diachronic variation, such as in the use of Language, Expressivity and Cognition Mikołaj Deckert, Piotr Pęzik & Raffaele Zago (eds) Bloomsbury, 2023, 256 pp; ISBN 9781350332867 Hardback £65 Where did this journey begin and when? English is descended from Proto-Germanic (PG), spoken 3,000 years ago in an area covering what is now Copenhagen and southern Sweden. It was a branch of Proto- Indo European (PIE), originating in the Urheimat, around Caucasia, perhaps 4,000 years ago. Over time, the PG homeland split, one part migrating south-west to the current Dutch-German border.

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