The pragmatics of denial and resistance: Some theoretical and methodological considerations

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1. Introduction

The precise nature of what is intended, implied, suggested, hinted at, alluded to, etc., or the speaker’s commitment to (or accountability for) that, may become the subject of discursive dispute and negotiation (Haugh 2008). Contrary to what is largely assumed in (neo-)Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches to communication (Arundale 2008, Haugh 2009: 92), situations such as these may involve underlying, dynamic tension between divergent interpretive and sociocultural norms and expectations that cannot be reduced to contextual differences (Haugh 2008). The failure to perform an intended perlocutionary act is called “perlocutionary frustration” (Langton 1993). Various types of speaker denial (e.g., “Oh no, I never meant that”, “I didn’t say that”, or “I was mistranslated”) must be distinguished from those of recipient resistance (e.g., “That is wrong in various ways”). Not only have many researchers, such as Gibbs and Siman (2021), tended to conflate the two, they have also focused on one trope in isolation, namely metaphor, and on only one level of communication, namely the verbal, and imposed an Anglo-centric perspective on other languages and cultures. Specifically, Gibbs and Siman have mistakenly described the overt denial of metaphors as “cancel[ing oneself]”/“resisting one’s own metaphor” (2021: 679). For these authors, apology or shame seems to be a defining feature of so-called “cancel culture” (not to be confused with the notion of “cancelation” in pragmatics). Interestingly, “cancel” or “canceled”, complete with scare quotes for sanity’s sake, is a word Gibbs and Siman use to mean “removed from positions of responsibility” (279). That could also be referred to as “self-criticism”, but the latter term is, among other things, too narrow in that it excludes many important forms of denials, as we shall see. Finally, the literature on metaphor resistance is also commonly restricted to elite discourses, such as media texts and parliamentary debates. This narrow focus does a great disservice to scientific research. Previous research also fails to limit bias because the data it uses are generally not ‘corpus data’ in the sense that corpus linguists would recognize. It would also benefit greatly from the systematic application of Edda Weigand’s theory of New Science, which recognizes language as dialog basedon the sequence of action and reaction (the Dialogic Principle proper), as outlined in Figure 1. This also means that there is a need to break from classical science to New Science (e.g., Weigand 2023, Weigand & Kecskés 2018). These gaps need to be filled.

Figure 1. The Dialogic Principle proper (Weigand 2023: 37)

Above I have illustrated rather than defined “denial” and “resistance”. Before proceeding to the definitions, it is important to place this paper in the context of previous research. Some studies have inquired as to the reasons why and how people reject metaphors, and preliminary responses have been offered. The motivations for rejecting a metaphor are numerous and diverse. The most frequently cited reasons by researchers continue to be irrelevance, offensiveness, oversimplification or lack of explanatory power, and political rivalry or moral non-alignment (e.g., Gibbs & Siman 2021, van Poppel 2018). It is thus important that we do not confuse the questions of “why” and “how”. For Gibbs and Simon, there are two types of resistance: partial (where the same concept is kept, whereas roles and valence are switched) and complete (where the source domain is rejected altogether). Musolff (2022a), on the other hand, distinguishes between three types of metaphor rejection and/or subversion: irony (i.e., the figurative claims’ implicatures are put in doubt implicitly), sarcasm (i.e., their plausibility is explicitly decried) and satire (i.e., their presumed absurdity is exhibited). In other words, there are various degrees of im-/explicitness of the dissociation between what a speaker says and how this is rejected in discourse. Ways of critiquing or opposing a speaker’s metaphor or hyperbole thus range from critical “thematization” and dismissal to implicit ironical relativization and sarcastic-satirical debunking. These categories are, however, based more on speculation and intuition than analysis, as Musolff draws on quite a few examples from a corpus of English media texts. In particualr, Musolff focuses on “exaggerated figurative claims of (imminent) success” in the ‘war’ against COVID made by the British government in 2020 and how they are made objects of parody. In other words, he focuses on media reactions to figurative war announcements and how this might impact public trust in pandemic policy. He therefore cannot say anything about how ordinary people might react to government announcements. Similarly, one of the most recent research papers on resistance to (violence) metaphor(s) (for cancer) by Wackers and Plug (2022) analyses a few paragraphs in a couple of Op-Ed articles, limited to two clauses: one elaborating or filling in the “winning”― a realization of either the SPORTS or the WAR analogies, or of a combination of both― as “living graciously and courageously with the disease until the very end”, the other, “unfair fight”, involving an adjective that modifies the noun, or what Barnden (2016) has termed “elaborative correction” of metaphor.

The studies I have cited so far in this section have not only tended to focus on metaphor and the verbal mode of expression, but also to conflate things and to impose an Anglo-centric perspective on other languages and cultures. At the risk of repetition, the data used in such studies are not generally ‘corpus data’ in the sense that would be recognized by methodologically oriented corpus linguists, and therefore the literature fails to restrict bias. Almost none of these cognitive approaches revolves around reactions from laypeople or social media users. On the other hand, the very considerable body of work on denial and resistance also fails to recognize language as “negotiation” or as an action-reaction sequence (dialog). It had been anticipated that other researchers would fill these gaps; however this did not occur. Consequently, the necessity for a project of this kind persisted. To further advance the field of denial and resistance research, this paper addresses a multitude of methodological and theoretical concerns. In particular, it focuses on the following questions:

• What is common to denial and resistance and what distinguishes them?
• In what forms are the acts of denial and resistance realized?
• Do people resist figures of speech other than metaphor?
• How and why do they reject visual/multimodal tropes?
• Why does a theory of negotiation need to go beyond the ‘speaker-hearer’ dichotomy?

I will start with the definitional problem, then proceed, first, to the scope of denial and resistance, and second, to a general discussion. Section 4 lists some general conclusions.

2. Elements of a theory of speaker-denial and audience-resistance

2.1. The definitional problem

First, we need to distinguish between speaker denial and audience resistance. The literature lacks information about the illocutionary functions of both types of acts: as noted by one anonymous reviewer, denial is a type of representative act, while resistance includes a statement (‘I do not agree’, ‘I do not intend to submit’) and a demand (‘I demand’). Recognizing that human beings are dialogic, intentional, goal-oriented, persuasive, cultural, and moral individuals (Weigand 2021) is the first step in solving the definitional problem and in developing a theory of denial and resistance. In fact, negotiation between interactants, albeit a common term used by discourse analysts, is rarely analyzed (Leech 2014). As noted by Weigand, each speech act can be either initiative or reactive, but complexities also arise. Generally, denials, blatant or subtle, explicit or disguised, are a move in a strategy of self-defense against explicit or implicit accusations, but also part of the strategy of face-keeping or positive self-presentation (van Dijk 1992). In the latter case, van Dijk claims, they are preemptive, that is said or done before someone else has a chance to act or attack so that their plans or actions are prevented from happening. In van Dijk’s words, “they may focus on possible inferences of the interlocutor” (91; italics his). A reactive denial can simultaneously be an initiative if a recipient reacts to such a denial. The offense someone has admitted to committing may at the same time be excused or justified (Cody & McLaughlin 1988). Studies of denials aim to criticize, challenge or oppose such discourse. Van Dijk (1992), examining racism denials as a form of positive self-presentation, distinguishes various types of denials – disclaimers, mitigations, euphemisms, excuses, blaming the victim, and reversals. The latter may be part of a strategy of flat denial and (counter-)attack. There are also some denial strategies that, if taken at face value, do not seem to fit into any of van Dijk’s categories, including instances of what I term “attribution-denial”, in which speakers attempt to distance themselves from controversial comments (e.g., “I was only quoting”) (Boogaart, Jansen & van Leeuwen 2022, Haugh 2008). This may, however, fall into the category that van Dijk has called a “transfer move”. Haugh (2008) also identifies instances where speakers claim that they were mistranslated or taken out of context, or that they were targeting a specific audience, not the wider public. In part the strategies identified here overlap with the category that van Dijk has termed “control-denial”.

Within pragmatics, Grice (1989) further makes an important distinction between contextual cancellations and overt denials of implicatures and presuppositions (cf. also Horn 1972, Gazdar 1979, Leech 1983). Crucially, one can directly and overtly deny implicatures without a sense of contradiction, as in “John has three cows, in fact ten” (Levinson 1983). Boogaart, Janse, and van Leeuwen (2020) to some extent go beyond denial of implicature to explore denial of literal meaning, since the latter may also be negotiable. Thus at least two quite different senses of the term ‘denial’ can be found in the literature, but it was the Gricean sense that eventually became influential. Indeed, cancellation in a Gricean sense is not the same as a speaker’s denial of commitment to an implicature at a later stage, in response to widespread public indignation and distrust (Boogaart, Janse & van Leeuwen 2020). In fact, the situation was first noted by van Dijk, who was ignored not only by Haugh but also by Boogaart and his colleagues. However, this idea can be traced back to the pragmaticist Geoffrey Leech (1983), who suggests that “negative sentences tend to be used in situations [...] when s [speaker] wants to deny some proposition which has been put forward or entertained by someone in the context (probably the addressee)” (101). For instance, a negative sentence like “Abraham Lincoln was not shot by Ivan Mazeppa” is a denial of what someone else has asserted, i.e., of the allegation that Mazeppa shot Lincoln. Deborah Tannen’s book That’s Not What I Meant was published five years before van Dijk’s journal article, but her focus was on intention-denial. It is increasingly easy now to find critics who, when challenged, say “I was just asking” or “just joking” or otherwise “didn’t mean anything by it”, thus disclaiming (perhaps sincerely) the intent to criticize (Tannen 1986). If they admit to making critical remarks, the validity of the criticism is likely to be defended: “You were doing it wrong” or “I said it because it’s true” (135).

Finally, we need to distinguish between genuine and sarcastic denials. For instance, when his people accused him of demolishing their idols, the prophet Abraham replied sarcastically: “Nay, it was the biggest of them, this one [idol], that has done it. So, ask them [the destroyed gods] [for that matter], in case they can speak” (the Qur’an 21: 62–63). He had no intention whatsoever of distancing himself from the destruction of the idols. He wanted his people to conclude that such idols could not defend themselves and therefore should not be worshipped as gods. Put another way, he indirectly provided a reason why the biggest idol could not destroy the smaller ones (they all had none of the characteristics of life), and in so doing could be understood to be accepting the accusation. Abraham confounded his people and proved these gods could do nothing: “Certainly you know these [idols] do not speak”, they replied, their heads down in shame. They, however, vowed to take revenge on the man who had destroyed their gods. Abraham had thus been cast into a roaring fire as a punishment.

In contrast, resistance (or rejection, questioning, or non-acceptance) is an opposing or negative reaction to a text, talk, or discourse. Put simply, it refers to im-/explicit commentary on the limitations of certain words, phrases, or clauses (such as metaphors, metonymies, and gendered pronouns), and/or the offering of alternatives (see Lakoff & Turner 1989). Fetzer (2007) thus considers a non-acceptance as “a responsive act par excellence” (493). But this also holds true for a denial. Again, there is considerable overlap, in fact equivalence, between audience resistance and “perlocutionary frustration” (Langton 1993). The latter is a common enough fact of life: people speak, but may fail to achieve the effects that they intend; for example, a joke falls flat; an argument persuades no one, etc. In fact, there are two types of resistance: objectionable words or phrases and objectionable ideas. They differ in that if an objectionable expression is rephrased, paraphrased, or replaced by an alternative frame, the speaker may succeed to achieve the effects he/she has intended. A meta-analysis of the overall efficacy of different types of framing effects in the political domain shows that citizens may be more competent than some envision them to be (Amsalem & Zozner 2020). Hence, Druckman’s (2001) main plea is for political scientists and communication scholars to focus on failed framing effects, not just successful ones. This is old news. But it is social power abuse (rather than the resistance against such domination) that is the focus of most research in critical discourse studies (CDS) (van Dijk 2021). The aim of resistance studies is not to criticize or challenge such discourse, but to be “solidary, on the one hand, [and] at the same time critical of text or talk that violates fundamental norms of a democratic society” (van Dijk 2021: 8). There are two forms of resistance ― overt/direct and covert/indirect. The former is clear and unambiguous. It can be straightforwardly identified through the use of linguistic markers such as negation or a syntactically positive equivalent. Consider the following headlines: “The trouble with viewing 9/11 and the pandemic through a wartime lens” (the Washington Post) and “Reaching for military metaphors won’t help Britain learn to live with COVID” (the Guardian). Both these headlines directly reject the war metaphor for the coronavirus pandemic. Indirect resistance, on the other hand, is masked by humor, irony, and sarcasm. It can only be interpreted contextually, at the discourse level. In general, “the interpretation of implicit meanings of discourse […] is constrained by sociocognitive norms that regulate plausible inferences and expectations” (van Dijk 2014: 282). Back in 2015 when I interviewed visual artist James Nazz about his intentions behind the creation of a picture that portrays the euro as a maze that is ringed in layers like an onion, he described his thought process in the following way: “I like my onions sliced in circles battered in egg with bread crumbs then fried till crispy. It’s just a maze”. The ironic force of this metaphorical overextension or overelaborations is signaled not only by exaggeration or excessive detail but also by the second clause. Analyses of this sort provide important lessons for linguistic and psychological accounts of metaphor understanding (cf. Musolff 2000). Specifically, they refute Grady’s (1997) claims of the poverty of mappings, such as that of THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS. For him, sentences such as “?This theory has French windows” and “?The tenants of her theory are behind in their rent” are not readily interpretable, given that such salient elements and functions of buildings fail to map. My preliminary results are likely to change much. They show that overextending or overelaborating a metaphor in a funny or ironic way― overdone metaphor  (in the sense of Attardo (2015) ― is only one of the main forms of resistance to it. The resistance here is indirect, rather than direct.

2.2. Beyond metaphor

The literature on resistance to figurative language has typically focused on one trope in isolation, namely metaphor, rather than on the combinations of different tropes or types of nonliteral language, including irony, sarcasm, metonymy, hyperbole, and litotes (cf. Barnden 2020, Popa-Wyatt 2020). Guardian production editor Jamie Fahey wrote on 22 November 2010, in an article that resisted military metaphors: “Bombarding readers with the language of the battleground is hyperbolic, fatuous and insensitive”. The gratuitous use of martial metaphors in news stories is hyperbolic because it takes the most extreme violence possible. Ironically, the Guardian column ran under the headline “Let’s declare war on these tired military metaphors”. That is, although Fahey openly, consciously, rejected the language of the battleground, his headline used that same metaphor. A different irony within metaphor rejection is seen in the fact that negating a frame evokes the frame (Gibbs & Siman 2021, Wegner et al. 1987). Not only overstatement, but also understatement may be used to deceive the audience (Leech 1983), or to make something seem less serious than it really is, and therefore may be resisted. Consider, for example, the literal term ‘global warming’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the increase in temperature of the earth’s atmosphere that is caused by the increase of particular gases, especially carbon dioxide”. Some people, including Guardian journalists and editors, now use the term ‘global heating’ instead of ‘global warming’ to emphasize how rapid and serious this gradual increase in world temperatures now is. The nouns warming and heating connect the earth’s atmosphere to a particular region in heat space (cf. Langacker 2008). In other words, the terms form a scale (hot, warm); thus ‘global warming’ entails ‘at least warm’, but merely scalar implicates ‘not hot’; ‘global heating’ entails ‘global warming’, allowing the generalized implicatures not cold, not warm, and so on. In short, “the scale of heat is [...] organized so that what is hot is a special sub-case of what is warm” (Levinson 1983: 138). Interestingly, ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ is also used by the Guardian in preference to ‘carbon dioxide emissions’. The latter is not inaccurate, but the former recognizes all the atmosphere-heating gases, such as methane, nitrogen oxides, that is all members of the same category of CLIMATE-DAMAGING GAS (see Lakoff 1987). Put differently, ‘carbon emissions’ narrows the range of gases that are involved in the act of heating to carbon dioxide, whereas “gas emissions” broadens the range of climate-damaging gases. From a cognitive linguistic point of view, the former is a construal of salience (here, of focus of attention) based on a part-whole configuration (Croft & Wood 2000, Paradis 2009), or a MEMBER FOR CATEGORY metonymy in which carbon dioxide stands for gases that cause the increase in temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. By contrast, ‘gas emissions’ involves a CATEGORY FOR MEMBER OF CATEGORY metonymy in which “gas” stands for particular gases, especially carbon dioxide. This latter means that the “active zone” of the trajector/gas that is involved in the act of damaging or heating is not limited to carbon dioxide (see Langacker 2008). To sum up, “carbon emissions” zooms in on a salient member of the “warming gas” class, whereas “gas emissions” zooms out from it to code the frame element of GAS as an integral, undifferentiated whole. There is considerable overlap, but no equivalence, between metonymies and alternations within norms. The latter “generally represent differences in focus [or emphasis], e.g., rather than differences in overall clause meaning” (Hanks 2013: 174). For instance, Hanks explains that one can talk about repairing the house, or alternatively, with a slightly different focus (on parts of a whole), about repairing the roof, or you can focus on the presupposition and talk about repairing the damage– all with reference to the same event type. Differences of emphasis (or lexical alternations) gradually and systematically shade into difference of meaning (or semantic-type alternations).  

2.3. Beyond the verbal mode

Third, denial and resistance studies need to turn to the text-image question – that is, to go beyond the habits and perspectives of verbally centered research traditions. In addition to altering its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises unfolding around the world, the Guardian has recently provided updated guidelines on which illustrations its journalists and editors should use to convey the severity of the climate and ecological emergency. The visual information may reveal aspects of meaning whose presence is simply not extractable or predictable from the verbal modality alone (Bateman 2014, Clark 2022). For instance, the lateral mapping of time is totally absent in spoken language. Monday comes before, rather than to the left of, Tuesday (Cienki 1998). Partly this is because people acquire the words and concepts “left” and “right” later than many other basic spatial terms and categories, but also because of their more error-prone use (as is evident from such expressions as “no, your other left”) (Casasanto & Jasmin 2012). Similarly, Edwards (1997) claims that whereas a columnist who calls a governor a pimp or prostitute may be sued for libel, a political cartoonist who visually depicts that political figure as such is potentially amusing or actually funny, “for there is a simultaneous recognition of what the governor is (figuratively) and is not (literally)” (26). Using the example of 25 young people’s responses to a Daily Mail cartoon on the subject of same-sex marriage, El Refaie (2011), however, found that several interviewees rejected the cartoon humor for religious reasons. When interviewed about his intentions behind the creation of this cartoon, the artist, Stan McMurty, was at pains to emphasize that he was just having “a laugh,” not “a go at gay people” (El Refaie 2011). Some, albeit few, experimental studies thus also directly target audience reactions to denials of intended meaning (see Bonalumi et al. 2023). After all, the issue is choosing the pertinent pieces, rather than recording as many data as possible. To quote Weigand (2021), “[d]ata alone cannot open the complex whole” (6); they are “an open, unlimited set of empirical means” (ibid.).

2.4. Beyond the laboratory

One burning question is whether, with more data, the experimental evidence for the “psychological reality of” metaphoric framing effects will strengthen or weaken. Crucially, there is a tremendous debate going on about methodological rigor and replicability. Indeed, effects observed in the laboratory might, however, be “hothouse flowers”. There is indeed a tremendous debate going on about methodological rigor and replicability. For Ioannidis (2005), “most claimed research findings are false” (0696). Symposia and journal special issues on this topic just keep coming (e.g., Sönning & Werner 2021). El Refaie (2011) admits that her research method (qualitative one-to-one interviews) has some drawbacks. By contrast, observing real-world behavior inhibits (or at least counteracts) bias and opts out of the replication debate in psychology. Effects observed outside of the laboratory in the full complexity of the real world require no special care (i.e., no perfectly controlled laboratory conditions) for them to burst into full bloom. A measure of real-world behavior has other important advantages: It allows plenty of time for reasoned reflection, and participants cannot guess the purpose of the study (e.g. Segel & Boroditsky 2011). Therefore, metarepresentational follow-ups of public discourse statements are analyzed by, among others, Sperber (2000) and Musolff (2022) as evidence of how parts of the public audience interpret those statements (see also Weizman & Fetzer 2015). The objectivity of this research can, however, be improved by corpus linguistics approaches (Baker 2012). For Baker (2006), using corpora enables researchers to place many restrictions on their cognitive biases, but cannot remove bias completely (McEnery & Hardie 2012). Their selection, screening, and interpretation of data can indeed reveal bias. But several steps could be taken to help improve matters. These include (i) writing methods sections more scrupulously, (ii) continuously cumulating meta-analysis, (iii) investing in more reliable measures and larger sample sizes, (iv) avoiding a simplifying Anglo-centric bias, and (v) reporting, rather than over-reporting, noticed exceptions alongside the overall patterns or trends (see Baker 2006, Ledgerwood 2014).

2.5. Deliberateness: implying versus inferring

Fifth, the topic of denial and resistance originates with debates in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, specifically debates about the deliberate use of metaphor and the speaker’s level of accountability to broader society (Haugh 2008). Obviously, the use of metaphors is not a pragmatic issue without taking into account the illocutionary aspect: what communicative effects are intended by the sender through the use of metaphors? For Musolff (2016), commentators cannot castigate a metaphor as inappropriate, misleading, racist, or hate-fostering without presupposing that it has been deliberately used, so the denial of deliberateness can be easily falsified. According to Gibbs and Siman (2021), however, resisting the implications of some metaphor can be a “conscious” experience, but not necessarily. It can also be automatic and unconscious. Nonetheless, Steen (2017) maintains that consciousness is not the same as awareness, attention, or deliberateness. He speculates that “[p]eople are generally aware of details of language use and discourse during production, reception and exchange”, [but they] only seldom know that they are aware” (6). The difference between deliberate and non-deliberate metaphor, he claims, is that the latter does not involve the intentional use of metaphor as metaphor between speaker and hearer or addressee: when talking about argument, for instance, people “typically do not pay distinct attention to the source domain of war as a separate domain of reference” (2). For that author, “deliberate”, meaning “intentional”, should not be confused with “deliberative”, involving or showing careful consideration or discussion. The latter is a term that has been used by Gibbs (2015), but not by Steen. In this sense, all creative metaphors, including extensions and elaborations, may be deliberate. Only in special circumstances can people become conscious (i.e., know that they are aware) of details of language use and discourse (Steen 2017). Take for example when they compose a beautiful poetic line, or when language and discourse have special properties, such as being extremely deviant, ill-formed, difficult, or humorous (his examples). This in fact echoes the opinion of many. To quote Weigand (2023), “[ha]ving intentions means that we as dialogic individuals are goal-oriented beings” (34; her italics). Importantly, as noted by Forceville (2019), the deliberateness hypothesis has been there since time immemorial. For example, Lakoff and Turner (1989) argue that extensions are a large part of what makes poetic metaphor much more interesting, noticeable, and more memorable than conventional metaphor. This is because of “the special, nonautomatic use to which ordinary, automatic modes of thought are put” (72; see also Hanks 2013). These are notoriously slippery terms to define, however. First of all, Gibbs’ (2015) paper “Do pragmatic signals affect conventional metaphor understanding? A failed test of deliberate metaphor theory” should never have seen the light of day. In other words, both sides of the debate are barking up the wrong tree and/or confusing “inferring” (what a recipient [addressee, overhearer, or another party] does with “implicating” (what an author [speaker, writer, or artist] does). Recipients may infer deliberation and cross-domain mappings even when the metaphor is non-deliberate (cf. Musolff 2019). Similarly, the notion that by using simile the speaker wants his/her recipients to infer cross-domain mappings is a wrong hypothesis. Seemingly more plausible, then, is the distinction between fast and slow thinking, which has been explored by many psychologists over the last thirty-five years. For Kahneman (2011), the automatic processes of System 1 in the mind produce fast thinking, whereas the controlled processes of System 2 produce slow thinking. More clearly, System 1 works automatically and quickly, requiring little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control, while System 2 is “deliberate, effortful, and orderly” (Kahneman 2011: 20–21). This implies that System 1 “cannot be turned off” (25). It is through prolonged practice that mental activities become fast and automatic. System 1 thus has not just learned associations between concepts (the capital of Egypt?), but also learned skills such as reading a chess situation. But the normally automatic functions of attention and memory can be programmed by System 2. This is how System 2 can change the way System 1 works. Consider, for example, counting all occurrences of the letter a in this page (Kahneman 2011). Not only do System 1 and System 2 have implications for deniability or accountability, but they raise important questions about how people react to different types of metaphor. However instead of the rigid dead/alive dichotomy, I here draw on Müller’s (2008) more dynamic model, in which metaphors may “oscillate between sleeping and waking, depending on the degrees of activated metaphoricity in given contexts of use” (221). In the case of preemptive denials, for instance, recipients should recognize that the speaker, writer, or picture-maker explicitly wants them as audience to focus on wanted semantic or social inferences (those that lead to a positive impression). Blocking unwanted inferences (those that are negative for the speaker [van Dijk 1984]) requires recipients to infer deliberation. A corpus can be used to verify that this is actually the case. It can empirically show, for example, that blocking, as a pragmatic signal or marker of deliberate metaphor, really has a specific communicative impact on the target audience.

2.6. Beyond the monolingual participant

Another question raised is about the bilingual, bicultural/polyglot speaker/writer or hearer/recipient. Crucially, an expression which for an old, Arabic/English bilingual star exemplifies a cliché, an idiom, or a dead metaphor would have to count for another as a literal expression. In other words, the default meaning of a word or phrase varies from person to person, or, as put by Sampson (2013), one man’s metaphor is another’s exploitation. This has considerable implications for the study of denial and resistance. Let me illustrate this point with an example. An Egyptian actor, Omar Sharif, told the television presenter Mahmud Saad during a phone interview in January 2008 that he “worshiped” (in Egyptian Arabic) two of his fellow actors, Adel Imam and Ahmad Zaki, and that he often prayed (that) he would be filmed standing in front of them. His intended implicature has become the subject of post facto discursive dispute between hundreds, if not thousands, of Egyptian social media users. The main implicatures derived by those who were offended by his “worship” comments were that “Sharif is engaged in an act of worship”, that “He is a kaffir, a non-Muslim, infidel or unbeliever”, that “He shows profound religious devotion and respect to Imam and Zaki”, or that “He worships two human beings, not God” (implicature set I_A). By contrast, the main implicatures that were derived by Sharif’s supporters were that “He has a strong feeling of love and respect for Imam and Zaki”, and that “Imam and Zaki are the greatest actors Egypt or the world has ever seen” (implicature set I_B). Their comments contained words such as “unintended”, “metaphorical”, and “love, not worship”. Sharif’s advocates said his comments should not be taken literally, and that the Arabic word had a regular second meaning where “worship” was employed in the sense of ‘admire’, but those who were most critical of Sharif’s remarks continued to claim that what was implicated was in fact I_A. Still, there seems to be some cross-linguistic confusion. Sharif, a polyglot, employed the word in an English sense, which Arabic no longer has or does indeed forbid― and he fell into what may be called a “semantic trap”. In any case, such diverging interpretations may not arise in an increasingly secular West. The hyperbolic and figurative or non-literal meaning of the verb “worship” in English is “to love someone or something or admire them very much”. The most common literal meaning is “to show respect for God or a god, especially by saying prayers, singing, etc. with other people in a religious building”. But “Worship” (preceded by Your, His, or Her) is also “a title used to address or refer to a mayor, magistrate, or a person of similar high rank”.

Bilinguals are claimed to “feel less” in their second language (L2) ― hence the ease of discussing a sensitive topic such as sex in a foreign language (Bond & Lai 1986). This phenomenon is called “reduced emotional resonance of L2” (Toivo 2020: 2), or “Foreign-Language Effect” (e.g., McFarlane, Perez & Weissglass 2020, Miozzo et al. 2020, for the limits of this phenomenon, cf. Brouwer 2019). English/Arabic bilinguals share in two Knowledge-systems. Particularly interesting is whether when speaking they activate one or both systems. Bilingualism and multiculturalism may speak of a flexible and dynamic understanding of common ground (see Kecskés 2023). Since bilinguals always address others, it may, however, be hypothesized that they often activate the K-system they share with the recipient (that is the K-device of their mental model [van Dijk 2014]). A notable instance of this is former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy’s English description of his country’s relationship with the United States of America (USA) as “a marriage”, “not a one-night affair”, during a 2014 interview on Washington-based National Public Radio (NPR). By conforming to the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic norms of the target language, Fahmy has unintentionally violated his mother tongue’s system of values and beliefs: The native phrase he used, namely “a one-night affair”, has sexual connotations that have earned him the Egyptian public’s ― the culturally conservative, socially concerned, middle and lower middle class’― strong condemnation. The salient meaning of the idiom (a brief sexual encounter lasting only for a single night) is activated automatically, and need not to be abandoned and replaced by “a play, concert, etc. that is performed for only one night in a particular place”— the less salient meaning of the phrase. Two are then especially relevant to pragmatic failure (Thomas 1983): domestication (or cultural assimilation) and alienation (or foreignization) (cf. Venuti 1995). Or, to put it more succinctly, phrases are linked with the culture or history of the language community that employs them (Kӧvecses 2010). The English phrase used by Fahmy was aimed predominantly at an American audience. By using that phrase, Fahmy has opted for a source frame that, albeit rejected by the radio host (now in addressed recipient role) as unrealistic, has resonance for the target audience, thus making every effort to leave American listeners (now in ratified participant role, “albeit one that cannot assume the speaking role” [Goffman 1981: 232) in peace as much as possible and move himself toward them. People in this culture will thus find the use of words such as ‘one-night stand’ natural. By suppressing the foreign identity of his mother culture, Fahmy has therefore failed to protect Arabic monolingual speakers (now in unratified participant role) and bilingual reporters or opponents (now in eavesdropper role?) from the ideological dominance of the Anglo-American language or culture. His failure to modify his behavior might thus be taken as evidence that he did not know or suspect he was under study. To fill the news, the notion ‘is like’ has been subtitled or translated by many journalists and opponents (now in production role) into ‘is’ and the entailments of ‘marriage’ or ‘one-night stand’ have been made explicit. That is, not only has the image in the source text (ST) been retained in Arabic subtitles and translations, it has also been strengthened. However, Arabic monolingual speakers (now in ratified participant role) have demonstrated more rejection of the simile than of metaphor, because “is like” implies “is not” (i.e., America and Egypt are not in a legal marriage, but together). The word ‘marriage’ is loaded with different associations, called “primings” (Hoey 2012), in English (the source culture) and Arabic (the target culture) ― that is, the apparent exact equivalents are not equivalently primed ― and therefore Arabic translators should have probably avoided a literal translation and opted either for a corresponding TL-simile (such as “There’s a [business] partnership between the United States and Egypt”) or for a paraphrase (such as ‘Sure there’s history between Cairo and Washington’, or ‘Cairo has complex long-term relations with Washington’) (see also Schäffner 2004). The Arabic translation of the simile is tasteless but correct. The question now is whether misquoting someone, or changing their words, is the best way to be fair and accurate, that is, to help them get their point across clearly (Ray 2014). If so, we must not casually equate translation with treason. In other words, the only way to be faithful to conveying the intended effect to non-English speakers is, paradoxically, to be unfaithful to the semantic content of the original text (see also Yus 2010). In Danto’s words (1997: 61), “the [human] translator is a betrayer precisely when translation is given over precisely to deceit”, i.e., to mean something the source text was never intended to. Unlike human translators, machines cannot easily distinguish between different senses of a word such as bank (a river bank, a savings bank, etc.), but also have great trouble with satire, jokes, irony, wordplay, and cultural context. Turning back to Fahmy and Egypt’s media, then, people are stimulated to read by bad rather than good news. Egypt’s foreign ministry tried to deny that Fahmy used the MARRIAGE analogy and that there has been a mistranslation, but everything it did to make things better made them worse. Several Arabic newspapers, including Raialyoum and Youm el-Saba, have published editorials and op-ed columns criticizing the minister and/or rejecting the “marriage” metaphor. The continuing existence of diverging interpretations of what was implied by Fahmy’s comments, however, indicates that this incident cannot simply be labeled as a matter of miscommunication. After all, Americans, the target audience of the metaphor, would not have a problem with the analogy between marriage and the U.S.-Egyptian relationship. Robert Siegel, All Things Considered host, has again seemed to resist the analogy, but for a different reason: Fahmy has a deliberately unromantic view of marriage. Note that in 2002, Senator Fred Thompson, Republican of Tennessee, on “Fox News Sunday,” described United States-Saudi relations as “a marriage of convenience.” The comment caused no uproar. Finally, misunderstandings (or rather discursive disputes) can have literally fatal consequences (Haugh 2008, Tannen 1992). A case in point is the 1945 assassination of a former Egyptian finance minister, Amin Osman, whose anglophilia had also led him to describe the relationship between Britain and Egypt as “a Catholic marriage.”

2.7. Participant role

What appears to be of special interest to the pragmatics of denial and resistance, and to translation studies, is participant role (Levinson 1987), or (as Goffman [1981] prefers) issues of footing (see also Holt & O’Driscoll 2021). As noted by these scholars, difficulties in assigning addressees, recipients and other non-producing roles may be exploited for interactional purposes (as in the “uncovered meat” remarks, made by Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali and shifted by the Australian media from a specific audience in the Muslim community to wider society, that make for “unaccountable” and “deniable” insults [Haugh 2008]). Indeed, there are many cases where more categories of participant role are presupposed than speaker and addressee (or ‘hearer’), cases where the dyadic model of verbal interaction seems inadequate. For instance, former US president Donald Trump denied on Friday, 12 January 2018, using profanity to describe people from Central America and Africa during talks with US lawmakers the day before. But Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat who was in the meeting, contradicted Trump to local Chicago press on Friday morning. However, two immigration hard-liners, Republican Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who were also in attendance said they “do not recall the President saying these comments specifically.” This sort of example is obviously problematic for simple or traditional schemes. For Clark (1996), side participants and overhearers not only “help shape how speakers and addressees act toward each other”, but “also represent different ways of listening and understanding” (15). There has been very little acknowledgement of this in the literature on denial and resistance.

3. General discussion

Debating or negotiating meaning typically come in pairs, such that resistance (one part of the pair) usually requires denial (the second part) in response. Resistance-denial pairs, or paired utterances like accusations and defenses, are rarely studied as interactional sequences, although the process, synchronous or asynchronous, verbal or multimodal, is well documented. To put it differently, psycholinguists and discourse analysts regularly focus either on resistance  (a critical, judgmental, “face-attacking”, or solidary position) or on denial (a self-defensive or face-saving move).

Thinkers from Susan Sontag to Steven Poole resisted the ubiquitous use of, for example, war metaphors when referring to illnesses such as Aids, cancer, and COVID-19. Look also at these Guardian headlines: “In praise of … the right metaphor”, “Rules for writing: block that metaphor!”, “‘Frontline’: is it misleading to apply military metaphors to medicine?”, “Swarms, floods and marauders: the toxic metaphors of the migration debate”, “Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty”, “What’s with all the war metaphors? We have wars when politics fails,” “Why we shouldn’t be calling our healthcare workers ‘heroes’”, etc. Poole accepted and rejected the phrase “COVID frontline workers” depending on what the adjectival “frontline” meant: If this was a war against COVID-19, then the enemy was already behind our lines, and people did not have to be on the front line to become casualties; on the other hand, if “frontline” meant the melodic soloists of a jazz band, we all could agree that doctors and nurses were our star performers (2020a). He further criticized the oceanic metaphors for the pandemic (waves, surges) for instilling “a sense of inevitability and helplessness while erasing agency” (2002b, para. 9). Charlotte Higgins, the chief culture writer for the Guardian, was also critical of the language of heroism because it could be used to silence critics. Similarly, Margaret Simons, an award-winning freelance journalist and author, criticized the use of wartime metaphors to describe depression:

People are said to fight or battle depression – which seems to me to be particularly wrong. When I think of the people I know who have been through depression, I have images of journeys through dark forests, of living with the black dog. […] Depression is a process, surely, or a journey or a state of being, more than a battle. And if it is a battle, who is the enemy? Many depressed people could do with compassion for themselves, rather than suggestions they must fight their own heads. 

                             (2015, paras 6–7)

This latter example shows that people may resist metaphors because of a preference for alternatives, but also seems to suggest that those who resist metaphors consciously compare source and target. Crucially, Simons has struggled to complete so-called “mappings” (or “correspondences”) between depression and war. More specifically, she failed to find a counterpart to the frame element of “enemy”; or, to put it more accurately, it made no sense to connect “enemy” in the WAR space to “head” in the DEPRESSION scenario. That creates serious problems for the idea of “(partial) cross-domain mapping”, but also goes directly against the Lakoffian-Johnsonian stance that most reason or thought is unconscious, or that all metaphor use is something we do without thinking, i.e., something we do unconsciously or automatically. But rather than speculate fretfully on what goes on in the writer’s mind, we must leave this for future research. In any case, resistance cannot be taken as evidence of deliberate use on the part of speakers and writers. Put differently, we need to keep the distinction between recipient-inference and speaker-implicature.

4. Conclusion

This discussion has shown that despite the obvious link between the two notions “denial” and “resistance”, they have largely been examined separately. Further, the literature needs to move not only beyond metaphor but, quite plausibly, beyond elite discourses, and to recognize the notion of dialogic action, as understood by Edda Weigand. Both kinds of approach should also be concerned with multimodal corpora of online or social media materials across languages and cultures. Mediated mass-communication is much more complex than face-to-face communication in that when a misunderstanding occurs, “the opportunities for immediate repair are usually non-existent, particularly if the communicative exchange is not live but, in one way or another, pre-recorded or already published” (Forceville 2020: 110). Still, although language users who break social norms may not immediately respond to requests for comment, most of them individually resent being condemned as, say, racists or sexists (van Djik 1992). By this, van Dijk also means that awareness of misalignment is a prerequisite for correction/repair, that repair is highly desirable when a misalignment can be potentially catastrophic with respect to achieving communicative goals, and that repair is likely to occur when its cost is considered too low relative to the potential gains from engaging in repair (Elder & Beaver 2022). Elder and Beaver’s notion of “conversational repair” is, however, misleading as it implies a focus only on spoken communication (see also Clark 2022). Apologies are therefore made and recorded on the corrections and clarifications page of, for instance, the BBC’s website or printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column. Commenting is also a quintessentially modern form, created by and fashioning the internet. It unites many divergent impulses around a source, showing us what participation online implies. The presence of the original author is not required, however. “Online comment”, visual and verbal, is typically “reactive, short and asynchronous” (Reagle 2015: 2) – meaning that it can come seconds, hours, days, months or years of its provocation. It is social and meant to be seen by others. Newspapers and social media platforms try to curate a reasoned debate in comments but also can shut down discussion. Clearly, then, Elder and Beaver’s ideas are relevant to written and spoken as well as multimodal communication. A distinction can then also be made between synchronous and asynchronous “cancellation” (Gazdar 1979), meaning that denials, suspensions, clarifications, etc. can be made within seconds, hours, days, months, or even years after the event. Pragmatics studies of denial have largely been limited to the former, that is synchronous communication.

About the authors

Ahmed Abdel-Raheem

Author for correspondence.
Email: ahmedelsayed20017@gmail.com
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7547-150X

faculty at Siedlce University, Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, in Siedlce, Poland. Нe held lectureship and research positions at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland, and at both Leuphana University Luneburg and Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. He is author of two monographs, Pictorial framing in moral politics: A corpus-based experimental study (2019, Routledge) and Frame flouting: A theory of language and mind (Routledge, forthcoming).

References