Uruguay is currently one of the most socially, economically, and politically stable countries in Latin America, which renders the analysis of political narratives as tools of strategic institutional communication in the presidential discourse of Yamandú Orsi particularly relevant. The theoretical framework draws on political linguistics, integrating the critical discourse analysis of N. Fairclough, the socio-cognitive approach of T. van Dijk, the discourse-historical method of R. Wodak, and the rhetorical-critical approach of J. Charteris-Black. The aim of the study is to identify the key political narratives in Orsi’s discourse and analyze their linguistic representation and discursive functions. The methodological toolkit includes critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and linguo-ideological analysis. The empirical material comprises 34 public speeches delivered by Orsi between March 1, 2025, and April 18, 2026. The analysis identifies the mechanisms of strategic construction of a positive institutional image of Uruguay both domestically and internationally, as well as the nationally specific features of the leader’s rhetoric. The study reveals five key political narratives structuring the presidential discourse. First, democracy is conceptualized as the foundation of state stability and social cohesion. Second, pluralism and the alternation of power are presented as essential principles of democratic development that ensure a balance of interests. Third, continuity of power is interpreted as a guarantee of stability, fostering political predictability. Fourth, economic and social stability is portrayed as a direct consequence of political stability. Finally, peaceful coexistence – both domestically and internationally – is presented as a prerequisite for sustainable development. Collectively, these narratives, expressed through diverse linguistic mechanisms (ideologemes, metaphors, syntactic parallelism), construct an image of Uruguay as a stable state oriented toward dialogue, social justice, and international cooperation. The findings contribute to the study of nationally specific varieties of Latin American political discourse.

Verbal and visual metaphorical and metonymic images are key instruments of political satire, enabling the concise and expressive conveyance of evaluative attitudes toward socio-political realities. However, the multi-level mechanism of creating and decoding such figurative constructs in polycode cartoon texts has not yet received a systematic account. The aim of this study is to identify the stages of encoding and decoding metaphorical and metonymic images, expressed visually and/or verbally in English-language political cartoons, and to establish the role of linguistic and pictorial codes in meaning-making through conceptual integration. The empirical material comprises 200 political cartoons (100 British and 100 American) published as editorial illustrations in The Guardian and The U.S. News & World Report from May 2024 to May 2026. The study draws on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, Johnson), Conceptual Integration Theory (Fauconnier, Turner), and the principles of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (O’Halloran); Trim’s (2024) six-level framework for monomodal political media texts is adapted to model the stages of figurative creation and decoding. The findings reveal that Trim’s six-level model is transformed into a five-level structure: cultural and political contexts are integrated at a single level, while the visual/verbal metaphor, metonymy, or metaphtonymy is distinguished as the initial decoding stage. The analysis identifies the dominance of the pictorial code and three types of intersemiotic ties between the visual figurative unit and the verbal component: weak (the linguistic element is uninformative), elaborative (the verbal code provides minor clarifications of reference and/or enhances the satirical message), and key (the linguistic component determines the reference domain of the visual image). Special attention is given to cases of metaphtonymy, in which metaphor and metonymy function inseparably within a single polycode sign. The study contributes to the investigation of metaphorical encoding and decoding stages in semiotically heterogeneous texts and opens avenues for a comparative analysis of British and American satirical traditions.

Given China’s rise as the world’s leading automotive producer and the radical transformation of the Russian market, societal acceptance of new market entrants remains a difficult communicative task. Against the backdrop of growing sales and persistent consumer ambivalence, this study examines how Russian consumers discursively construct, challenge, and renegotiate the legitimacy of Chinese automobile brands in online forums. Drawing on Suchman’s multidimensional legitimacy framework and Van Leeuwen’s legitimation mechanisms, we conduct a mixed-methods content analysis of 1,144 comments sampled from two leading Russian automotive platforms (2014–2023). The approach combines manual polarity coding, which traces the temporal shift from early skepticism to societal acceptance, with a thematic analysis that maps consumer narratives across the pragmatic, moral, and cognitive dimensions of legitimacy. Within each dimension, we specify the discursive strategies and linguistic means consumers use to secure (de)legitimation. The findings reveal an asynchronous legitimation process: pragmatic legitimacy, anchored in cost–benefit and reliability discourse, consolidates first; cognitive legitimacy is accomplished through normalization and historical analogies; moral legitimacy, by contrast, proves the most resistant to change, sustained by value-laden metaphors and social identity debates. We further show that legitimacy formation is not linear but a dialogic exchange between professional automotive journalism and lay consumer discourse on digital platforms. By reworking market categories through everyday communicative practices, ordinary consumers act as active legitimacy agents. Taken together, the results provide a processual, empirically grounded account of brand legitimation in transitional markets with practical implications for market entrants and policy-makers, and extend research on digital professional communication by documenting the growing weight of electronic word-of-mouth in institutional market debates.

Institutional asymmetry of legal terms is not uniform but graduated: the divergence between a term and its translation equivalent is located at different levels, from the status of an individual unit to the structure of an entire terminological field. The present study aims to demonstrate that the structure of a terminological field reproduces the structure of the legal institution it serves, determining the level at which the translation equivalent ceases to be reliable. Drawing on four illustrative cases arranged by an increasing degree of divergence – from the status of an institution (magistrate) through categorical classification (felony / misdemeanour) and the type of legal remedy (injunction) to the structure of the field (the English series of names for a legal practitioner against the single Russian advokat) – the article identifies a scale on which the function of a term and its equivalent may coincide, creating an illusion of equivalence, while the actual divergence lies in the institutional structure. The analysis combines dictionary, statutory, and corpus data (the British National Corpus) with authentic court judgments. Corpus data are used to independently verify dictionary and statutory observations by establishing absolute frequencies and building collocation profiles for the core terms. Based on the analysis, a typology of four levels of asymmetry is constructed. The practical value of the results is twofold: for translation, they indicate when a functional equivalent suffices and when an institutional note is required; for bilingual lexicography, they justify an institutional label marking the level of a term’s divergence from its equivalent. The proposed approach shifts the description from merely stating cross-systemic differences towards explaining their mechanism. Institutional asymmetry is thus described as an ordered, graduated phenomenon, offering the notion of correspondence between terminological fields and legal institutions as an effective tool for comparative terminology studies beyond the examined language pair.

Although epistemic stance in academic discourse has been extensively researched in linguistics, relatively little is known about diachronic change and variation in its expression across disciplines, and still less about the grant proposal abstract, a genre produced under strong promotional pressure. The present paper addresses this gap by testing whether the widely reported trend towards research “hype” is reflected in the epistemic stance of grant proposal abstracts and, if so, whether it is uniform across disciplines. We examined three groups of epistemic stance expressions (hedges, boosters, and modal auxiliaries) in a 99.4-million-word corpus of openly available abstracts of successful NSF grant proposals representing seven disciplinary groups (biological sciences, computer and information science, engineering, geosciences, mathematical and physical sciences, social, behavioral and economic sciences, and education) and spanning the period 1987–2024. Using Kendall’s tau and linear regression, complemented by autocorrelation diagnostics, we established whether there is a consistent upward or downward trend in the incidence of these features in each discipline over time and estimated the size of the differences. The results complicate the picture drawn by existing discipline-specific studies of epistemic stance. Contrary to the upward trend observed in medical research abstracts, the frequency of boosters decreases consistently across four disciplines and in the corpus overall; the frequency of hedges follows a comparable downward trajectory, and modal auxiliaries decline overall, a trend accounted for largely by the high-frequency future marker will, though one that falls short of our consistency criterion, while individual modals move in opposite directions. These findings suggest that trends in the expression of epistemic stance are highly dependent on discipline and genre, and that the assumption that the language of research is becoming uniformly less cautious and more promotional merits comprehensive, cross-disciplinary empirical examination. The study contributes to ESP research by demonstrating that the promotionalisation of academic writing does not operate uniformly across professional genres and disciplines.

Teaching philosophy statements (TPSs) are high-stakes promotional documents required for academic hiring, tenure, and promotion in higher education worldwide. Despite their gatekeeping function in professional academic discourse, TPSs remain an underexamined occluded genre: prescriptive writing guides offer general advice, but few empirical studies have described the rhetorical structure of authentic statements. This study addresses this gap by investigating the move-step structure and lexicogrammatical features of TPSs from an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective. A specialized corpus of 46 authentic TPSs written by faculty members and graduate students from North American universities (2004-2016) was compiled and analysed using corpus-based genre analysis. Functional moves were coded in MAXQDA with an inter-rater reliability of 94.9%, and keywords and three-word n-grams for each conventional move were extracted with AntConc. The analysis identified fourteen moves across three categories (teacher-focused, classroom-focused, and teaching/evaluation process), of which five were conventional. The most frequent and cyclical move was focus on teaching practices (100%), indicating that concrete classroom examples outweigh abstract philosophical declarations. The genre proved hybrid and flexible, with no fixed move order, combining features of academic prose (prepositional-phrase n-grams) and promotional genres such as CVs and application letters. Substantial variation emerged between faculty and graduate-statement corpora: faculty privileged philosophical concepts and mentorship, while graduate students foregrounded concrete activities, technology use, and diversity. A systematic comparison with twelve prescriptive writing guides revealed partial alignment but also several moves – such as acknowledging mentors and addressing students’ difficulties – that occur in authentic texts but are absent from the guides. The study contributes a genre model grounded in authentic data, offers empirically derived lexicogrammatical resources for novice writers, and provides pedagogical implications for teacher training and ESP instruction in academic genres.