J.D. Vance

Travis Linnemann, Corina Medley

Serhiy Potapenko, Vasyl Andriyko

The paper applies the “transforming the idea into eff ect” procedure to explain the mismatch between the European media negative impressions of the U.S. vice president J. D. Vance’s 2025 speech in Munich and his intended idea of shared values. This procedure reveals that negative verbal eff ects are triggered by three types of cognitive linguistic structures. They comprise morphosyntactic constructions, treated as unity of form and meaning entrenched in the human mind, diff erent degrees of their textual salience, their link to image schemas positioning humans relative to the environment. It is found that the vice president’s speech falls into two – cumulative and accusing– sections. The former picks faults with European leaders posed as the target of the speaker’s compulsion to stop their blocking the population’s freedom of speech. The accusing section portrays the European leaders as the source of democracy crisis and confrontation with the population. Key words: verbal eff ect, “transforming the idea into eff ect” procedure, morphosyntactic construction, salience, image schema, speech, U. S. vice president J. D. Vance.

W. Carver, S. Ratliff

W. Ullrich

M. Lauret

Abstract Dog whistles are defined as covertly racialized discourse characteristic of right-wing populist speech, but do they also work in writing? Discovery of dog whistles in literary texts requires a mode of suspicious reading that is important in discursively toxic times, but may also risk circularity. This conundrum is tested in a comparative, suspicious reading of two Trump-era memoirs, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, revealing remarkable parallels between their politics and aesthetics. Vance’s populist narrative voice consistently dog whistles ‘race’ in the very act of disavowing it, suggesting his memoir may be parasitic on Coates’. Close reading contrasts Coates’ polysemous ‘thick’ signification with Vance’s incoherent double-voicedness. Ultimately however, a dog whistling relation between the two memoirs remains hypothetical.