The talks

Frame narratives and blending constructions in Science Communication

Rosana Ferrareto Lourenço Rodrigues, Ph.D., IFSP, rosanaferrareto@ifsp.edu.br

Being curious and challenging conventional thinking to treat complex changes in the natural and social world for quality of life. Pushing boundaries by exploring and unlocking the unknown and finding a surprise in a pattern when pursuing a discovery. These are things that science can do. The effects of what science can do depend not just on the content of the research but also on how it is communicated. For science communicators, one of the challenges is to compress multi-dimensional information into language that is accessible and meaningful to their target audiences. This talk aims at shedding light on frames as a core component of human cognition, crucial for communicating meaning via shared image schemas and conceptual integration. The sentence-level analysis will focus on the scientific concept of causation in XYZ constructions and the textual analysis will look at double-scope story projections as ways to ground new information on prior knowledge. These Cognitive Linguistics constructs can guide readers and writers of scientific papers to blend new knowledge with the one they already have via analogy and metaphor and thus provide (novice) scientists with communicating their research findings more effectively.

Link for the slides: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f_KsNx3-sijVMEih9j868lBjvB3nNXBn/view?usp=sharing>

Image “blendings” as tools for enhancing legibility in academic texts

Antônio Suárez Abreu, Ph.D., UNESP/ SLMANDIC, tom_abreu@uol.com.br

My aim is to explore the use of image “blendings” as tools for enhancing legibility in academic texts. Throughout human history, we have learned to "translate" abstract verbs and nouns into images, to help our interlocutors understand better what we mean. This is clear when we compare an original excerpt from a scientific paper in dentistry (a) and a new version, including the concrete image of a villain (b): (a) In a surgery, when we have to extract the third molar in the lower arch, there is an additional problem because this tooth is usually in contact with the inferior alveolar nerve (NAI), and any accidental injury in it can cause permanent paresthesia in the patient. (b) In a surgery, when we have to extract the third molar in the lower arch, a villain can enter this stage: the contact between this tooth and the inferior alveolar nerve (NAI). Any accidental injury in it can cause permanent paresthesia in the patient. I intend to present further examples from academic texts in English and Portuguese, in order to help researchers to write more seductive and clearer texts.

Link for the slides: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K1cX1z9GrqbBT1d0UGLWhx4rcAYUGCEP/view?usp=sharing>

The Rhetoric of Passions revisited

Maria Flávia Figueiredo, Ph.D., UNIFRAN, mariaflaviafigueiredo@yahoo.com.br

In book II of Rhetoric, Aristotle points that emotions cause men to change their opinions and judgments. The present study examined this matter in a contemporary perspective to trace a scheme – which it is here addressed as The Emotion Track – that discusses how the passions take control of the human psyche leading men to action. A rereading of the emotions (passions) in the Aristotelian corpus based the first methodological step of this study. Then, grounded on modern studies on the subject, the way in which men is affected by the passions was pondered. And finally a scheme that points out how it is believed that the emotions in the human soul work in a discursive/argumentative context was proposed. The method leaded to the creation of The Emotion Track, a five-step scheme composed by: I Availability; II Identification; III Psychophysical alteration; IV Change of judgment; and V Action. Concluding, the proposition of The Emotion Track is expected to serve as a stimulus for the rhetoric researchers and will also constitute a shorter path in the face of the complex and unfinished understanding of the emotional universe and its consequences.

Link for the slides: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qgTFbeCVOnUbzOZboXOwYZBpnf_LrqV9/view?usp=sharing>

Stories projected from titles: expectations fulfilled (or not!) in the text

Beatriz Arruda Dona, Ph.D., UNESP/Integral/Lab. Adriano Chan, biaadona@gmail.com

Who has never been captured by the title of a text? How many times have you said “ It was worth having read the whole text" or " It was nothing of what I have imagined” ? After all, a seductive title plays an important role in leading the reader into the textual universe, creating expectations of what the text itself will be like. These expectations take place in a dynamic process of blending from which well-known literary stories are crossed with the reader´s experiences. From this intersection, an imaginary narrative is born. Besides this first result of conceptual integration, there is a second one, resulted from the blend and content the text actually presents, constructing a new and tempting blended space - which I call blend over blend, based on Turner (1996, 2003). This process can be seen within a narrative scope which predicts, according to Tobin (2018), some elements of surprise that will be fulfilled until the end of a story, in a trajectory from the title to the conclusion. There is no doubt that from expectations fulfilled (or not!) we inevitably enter the narrative world.

Link for the slides: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P82UsDgj6kaQQ0QvEtSk-Jlf-3fxW3pS/view?usp=sharing>

The Framework of themes in narrative argumentation

Adrian Steinway Chan, Master, UNESP/Lab. Adriano Chan, redacao@me.com

As human beings, we shape reality with our reveries. These wanders are made of linguistic material and of erratic images that we keep at the corner of our minds. When we write or when we say something, our need to express ourselves finds a way to blend our iconic data bank with our social lexical knowledge. This work aims to describe how words evoke our iconic and cultural experiences especially in argumentative narratives. We will try to explain how the most abstract ideas are framed by storytelling. We should focus in examples in which vocabulary itself is not accounted by its lexical meaning but by its cultural imagery and stories, especially in a world that tries to cope with diverse narratives. For that account, we will draw attention to the gay community language and compare their jargon usage to the articulation of misplaced words in school essays searching for an insight to explain gaps of effective communication because author and reader don’t share the same symbolic stories. Many times some communities code their language in order to segregate themselves. When it happens voluntarily, this hermetic environment serves its purposes. However when the misusage of coded language is unintentional, it opens possibilities to break the thread of thought and it gets impossible to understand the discourse purposes out of its context.

Link for the slides: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LoyfRyEIoUBLoJNVCf-CoCiaOHElHiSE/view?usp=sharing>