Churchill’s reflection discourse

Abstract

This study presents the results of a cognitive analysis of Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs at the textual, lingual and conceptual levels in order to interpret the implicatures of Churchill’s reflection discourse. The scope of the present research covers Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs as one of the most fruitful types of literary text with regard to the realization of reflection, which is organically interwoven into his texts. The study is done by means of complex analysis with the application of discourse, textual, semantic, cognitive, and conceptual analyses. In the process of the investigation, it was found that Churchill’s reflection discourse represents a special form of language use that discloses a cognitive personality type, which is characterized by the prevalence of logical, deductive and cause-and-effect reasoning. The conceptual space of Churchill’s reflection discourse is constructed as a network model which represents different types of relations among the reflection concepts (subordination, identity, spatial, associative, subjective-and-causative, opposition, causativeand-resultative, attributive, qualitative, attributive-and-possessive, attributive-and-appositive, partitive, functional, reversive-and-functional, paradoxical, and dependency). The verbalization of the reflection concepts actualizes the implicatures of Churchill’s reflection discourse and helps determine the dominant messages implied in Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs.