This paper aims to provide a text-based cognitive stylistic account of how lexical choices made by authors construe uncertainty; a prerequisite of the horror genre plot and the driving force behind its advancement (Carroll, 1990). Stephen King's The Shining (1977) recounts the story of how Jack Torrance, a wannabe-writer and a recovering alcoholic, slowly descends into madness as he develops an urge to kill his son and wife when the family moves to the Overlook, a remote haunted hotel, to be its caretakers during the off season.Through adopting Langacker (2008)'s Cognitive Grammar as the prime tool of analysis, this paper pays particular attention to how the construal operation of selection is exploited by the author to cause a semantic conflict and heighten the sense of uncertainty in the readers until they arrive to it at the end and reconcile the conflict they have been subject to along with the novel's denouement.

Under the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper attempts to analyse the interpersonal function of news texts through investigating the function of modality in the expression of bias in Arabic and English news reports. This paper deals with news reports from ideologically diverse newspapers, addressing various news events in order to come up with results as comprehensive as possible about bias through modality. This paper also aims to compare how Arabic and English news reports exploit modal expressions to interact with their readers. It has been found that while English news reports mainly use epistemic modal expressions to predict possible consequences of and describe unreal situations related to the incident reported, Arabic news reports interact with the audience through corroboration and emphasis of some aspects of the news event instead of offering possibilities and evaluations.

Within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the present article investigates the role of thematization in framing news reports in favor of the respective ideologies of the online versions of the English newspapers, The New York Times and The Telegraph (NYT and TG, hereafter), and those of the Arabic newspapers, Al-Ahram and Al-Jazeera (AH and AJ, hereafter). To this end, 40 news reports, 10 from each newspaper, were chosen for analysis. The 40 reports cover 10 major incidents in the period between February 2012 and July 2015. NYT is an American liberal media institution while TG is a British conservative one, and AH is a state-owned Egyptian newspaper while AJ is a global news organization owned by Al-Jazeera Media Network, the Qatari stateowned media conglomerate. The stark difference between the ideologies in both sets of newspapers, coupled with the different cultural background, is mainly reflected in how news reports arrange bits of discourse in order to steer the reader's perception of the news event in a certain ideological direction. Results reveal that each newspaper adjusts its headlines' schematic categories in the way that best serves its ideological goals, with the exception of AJ which sticks to the objective schematic categories predicted to be present in headlines. Additionally, analysis reveals that Arabic news reports depend on thematic markedness in the expression of bias more than the English ones.

This paper argues that horror fiction creates its effect through exploiting the workings of language in the minds of readers. As a genre that crosses many art forms, it might be tempting to analyze the multimodal vehicles of horror; the visual effects, the jump scares and the ominous music. However, studying the ability of language, on its own and without any audio-visual effects, to instill horror in its readers becomes even more enticing. The idea that words have the power to disrupt the reality of its readers is deeply rooted in the view of language as performative. The paper further argues that horror writers have manipulate linguistic structures in a peculiar way to serve the purpose of frightening their readers. To this end, an eclectic text-based cognitive stylistic approach is employed to analyze an excerpt from William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), demonstrating how the process of horror creation is both a textual and a cognitive one, whereby the mental image of reality in the minds of readers is manipulated and distorted by means of linguistic structures, hence horrifying them. Results reveal that for horror to be achieved, layers of blending take place in readers minds in order to arrive to horrific meanings textually described. Additionally, manipulation of syntactic complexity and the morphology of verbs intensifies the horrific effect.