Pauline Madella, PhD

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The 19th International Pragmatics Conference – IPrA 2025 will be held @ the University of Queensland, Brisbane, AU from 22 to 27 June 2025.

Below are the details of our panel: Navigating Media Discourse: Communication, Cognition and Affect

Authors:

1. Pauline Madella – University of Bedfordshire

2. Ryoko Sasamoto – Dublin City University

3. Julia Langkau – University of Geneva

Abstract

The “Navigating Media Discourse: Communication, Cognition and Affect” panel aims to reflect the recent developments in the study of pragmatics. In particular, it will discuss a range of communicative phenomena across mass media discourse in popular culture and the digital domain, including affect and imagined online communities. Cognition and communication are intrinsic to the way we engage in mass media and pop culture, whether it is in the way we relate to a TV programme, react to a piece of art, or experience digitally mediated communicative practices. Emotion and affective effects are ubiquitous aspects of these communicative phenomena as they are exploited in view of attracting the addressee(s)’s attention and focusing it on the cognitive effects intended by the Speaker (de Saussure and Wharton, 2020). Indeed, an increasingly growing body of research has been acknowledging the importance of this facet of communication (Alba Juez and Haugh, 2024). Furthermore, recent relevance-theoretic studies examine communication in the current media landscape, beyond one-to-one interaction (Forceville, 2020; Scott, 2022; Madella, 2024; Sasamoto, 2024a, 2024b; Yus, 2022).

The panel will discuss the interaction between communicators and audience, ostension and intention, and the affective side of cognition and communication as reflected in popular culture worldwide, through digitally mediated content, including: ‘food porn’ or ‘food terrorism’, drag language and affect in internet makeup, sarcasm and affect in TV sitcom Friends, as well as the affective-experiential meaning that fiction entails (Langkau, 2024), and affective-experiential meaning in manipulative and deceptive advertising.

Together, the panel papers will demonstrate the benefit of bringing affective sciences and cognitive sciences into pragmatics. The panel papers include a range of different approaches to the study of utterance interpretation, from relevance-theory to discourse-based approaches, to insights from philosophy. The diversity of approaches aims to encourage an integrative approach to pragmatics and a dynamic dialogue between and across fields within and beyond the realm of pragmatics.

The panel contributions are:

Title: Cognitive Effects and Popularity of Food Terrorism/Food Porn: A Relevance-Theoretic Analysis

Author: Ryoko Sasamoto – Nara Women’s University

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Title: Decoding Manipulative Advertising: Pragma-Cognitive Tools in Regulating Online Deceptive Commercial Tactics

Authors:

1. Giorgia Mannaioli – University of Genova

2. Alessio Sardo – University of Genova

3. Giulia Anselmo – Università degli Studi di Siena

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Title: On verbal sarcasm à la Chandler Bing: where cognitive and interactional pragmatics meet

Author: Pauline Madella – University of Bedfordshire

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Title: Affective Imagining in Response to Fiction and the Author’s Intention

Author: Julia Langkau – University of Geneva

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Title: From Stage to Screen: Drag Language and Affective Connection in Internet Makeup Discourse

Author: Maria Szymańska – University of Lodz

Lovely, lovely stuff!

IPrA2025 checklist:

Conference registration ☑️

Conference dinner registration ☑️

Pre-conference workshop registration ☑️ I’ll be attending the Corpus Pragmatics workshop by Mathew Gillings on Sat. 21st and I cannot wait for this.

More to follow ~ ~ ~