Given the key role played by political metaphors in multimodal discourse, the objective of the study is twofold: first, to contrast the main source domains used by the national and the international press in a sample of political cartoons depicting Catalonia’s independence process (September-November 2017). Second, to critically analyse the political and cultural (mis)conceptions behind the cartoons and their potential implications on the international audience’s perception of Spain. This study draws upon the groundings of Kress and van Leeuwen’s multimodal critical discourse analysis and Charteris-Black’s critical metaphor analysis in order to address Critical Multimodal Metaphor Analysis. The results show relevant differences in terms of source choice by the international vs. national press, since the former makes use of sources that are absent in the later, and vice versa. This study supports the claim of a critical multimodal metaphor analysis to examine political metaphors in multimodal communication.

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Following recent demands in the fields of cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, both individually and in a collective approach, this volume gathers different works focused on the interaction between discourse, cognition, and society. Romano and Porto's volume starts from the premises which take a common approach to language (language-in-use), viewing it as a changing and dynamic process of interaction in real discourse. They advocate for a change in the trends of cognitive linguistics in favour of studies which are empirically and statistically supported. All the chapters included in this volume study discourse strategies from a socio-cognitive perspective in very different scopes, applying and combining several theories and approaches shedding light onto this new trend or somehow different approach to sociocognitivism and discourse. The volume is divided into three sections, each one with a different, yet sometimes overlapping, focus of research. The first three chapters, written by Enrique Bernárdez, Eline Zenner et al., and Augusto Soares da Silva, focus on real case-studies in context, emphasizing the necessity of a situated analysis of discourse. The second part contains three chapters as well, by

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Amidst social changes in gendered language use, there is pushback from institutions such as the Spanish Royal Academy, which claims that the use of the generic masculine (e.g., bomberos ‘firemen’) in describing a mixed-gender group is equally inclusive of both men and women (Bosque 2012). By contrast, speakers of Spanish have increasingly adopted gender-inclusive alternatives to the generic masculine (e.g., bomberos o bomberas; Bengoechea 2015). Across two behavioral tasks, we investigated whether gender-inclusive forms actually lead to more inclusive interpretations. We found that the use of the inclusive form (by contrast to the generic masculine) indeed yields more inclusive interpretations, increasing the inferred femaleness of stereotypically male professions, but also decreasing the inferred femaleness of stereotypically female professions. In an attempt to explain the reasoning that delivers inclusive interpretations, we developed a computational cognitive model of the reasoning process. Our model treats the phenomenon as an instance of a markedness implicature: speakers use the longer, inclusive form to guide listeners away from their prior expectations. This work highlights the need for further research into the use of gender-inclusive language cross-linguistically, as well as for pushback against prescriptive institutions perpetuating stereotypes.