Speech effects from cognitive perspective: a case of President Zelenskyy’s 2022 address to the Polish Parliament

The paper examines the formation of speech effects from the cognitive perspective drawing on the impressions that Polish politicians voiced in reaction to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s 2022 address to the Parliament. The comparison of the speech, treated as part of the Ukrainian war discourse,with the ideas expressed by the politicians reveals three types of impressions: cited, i.e., borrowed from President Zelenskyy’s speech; prompted, or made up by the listeners from different concepts named in the speech; and situational, rendering the listeners’ personal assessment of the address. The methodologyof the paper rests on the dynamic cognitive model relating discourse activity to the successive verbal enaction of the human faculties of perception, based on figure versus ground opposition; categorization, which rests on image schemas; memory, coded in concepts; reasoning, associated with conceptualmetaphors. It is found that the most effective and well-remembered ideas of the speech are expressed by the brotherhood and temperature metaphors. They catch the listener’s ear because they occur in the introductory and concluding parts of the speech, being repeated a number of times though sometimes in a modified form. Constructing the temperature metaphor the Ukrainian President moves from the cool to the warm while the member of the audience cites it in a reverse order, emphasizing that the distance associated with the cold is in the past. The prompted impressions derive from the concepts of history and unity evoked towards the end of the speech and serving as the ground for the speech represented as the figure. The things the Ukrainian President says about the history of the two countries are prominent enough to draw the listeners’ attention. The situational effect of the standing ovation in response to the address of the Ukrainian president results from a cumulative impression of the speech as the figure against the audience as the ground being reconstructed with the help of a number of image schemas.