The chapter examines co-text images in multimodal texts. It highlights the increasing importance of images in political discourse. The intersemiotic relations which language and image may enter into are described with an emphasis placed on intersemiotic convergence. Two areas of multimodal research in Cognitive CDA are identified: multimodal constructions and multimodal metaphor. In connection with multimodal constructions, the chapter considers news photographs and shows how news photographs and their captions may coincide with respect to the conceptual dimensions of schematisation, viewpoint and attentional distribution. In connection with multimodal metaphor, the chapter shows how metaphors expressed verbally may also be expressed visually or cross-modally in verbal and visual components of the text. The role of intertextuality and interdiscursivity in accessing source-frames is highlighted. Two case studies are presented. The first considers visual and cross-modal examples of war and animal metaphors in immigration discourse. The second considers body-poses as a particular source of metaphoricity in images.

The introduction outlines the polyphonic and interactive character of Pliny the Younger’s Epistles by first looking at how Pliny constructs time and space of literary interaction in his social environment. The chapter then moves on with a discussion of interdiscursivity and generic interaction in Pliny’s letters and a review of scholarship on intertextuality. A case study of the triptych of letters 4.26-28 demonstrates how various forms of textual and non-textual interaction are combined in Pliny’s Epistles. Whereas the centrepiece of this series, Ep. 4.27 on the recitation of Sentius Augurinus’ poetry, focuses on oral exchange and mnemonic skills, the preceding letter (4.26) foregrounds the materiality of literature by playing with the motif of books as companions (comites) on journeys. The third letter (Ep. 4.28), on the other hand, emphasizes the visibility of famous writers whose portraits were placed and looked at in libraries. In addition to staging various forms of literary interaction, the triptych of Ep. 4.26-28 also showcases the letters’ intermediality. The introduction concludes with a key to the volume’s chapters.

In this chapter, König examines an array of ‘literary interactions’ in Pliny’s 10th book of Letters. She draws particular attention to the book’s ‘heteroglossia’ – the multiplicity of linguistic registers and literary genres that it evokes and adopts – and she shows how that heteroglossia enables Pliny to accrue increasing authority and expertise as the book progresses. Starting with letters 10.1-14, she first explores intertexts between Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan and other close-contemporary literature (in particular, the Panegyricus and Frontinus’ De Aquis). Her focus then shifts to Pliny’s incorporation of a range of specialist discourses (architectural, religious, legal, financial, hydraulic, etc.) across the rest of the book, discourses which gradually flesh out his credentials as an administrator with the ability to command many different areas of government. She ends by exploring Pliny’s interaction with Trajan via an allusion to Pliny the Elder’s address to Titus at the start of his encyclopaedic Natural History. In drawing attention to the range and impact of different kinds of intertexts across Letters 10 – from specific textual allusions to generic interdiscursivity – she underlines what this seemingly ‘administrative’ correspondence can teach us about Roman reading and writing habits and the blurred boundary between ‘literary’ and non/less-‘literary’ texts.

Linguistics as a modern science has invested its attention in describing structural rules and “trustworthy” parameters, which involve ideologies of objectivity, stability and invariance. These references conceived of language as an autonomous structured entity that created a kind of fixed ontology, relegating historical phenomena to a subaltern position. One can thus say that linguistics and history have been traditionally kept apart in the field of mainstream language studies. Considering the self-enclosure of linguistics, in this chapter, we begin by discussing how historicity and language are associated by different twentieth-century philosophers whose insights into historicity speak well to contemporary views of language as discourse. We then move into exploring how history is brought into textuality in present-day discourse studies by focusing on the macro–micro theoretical constructs of interdiscursivity and intertextuality. We conclude by drawing upon the relevance of such a theoretical apparatus to account for discourse circulation in fluid and superdiverse contexts. A specific question orients our line of reasoning and the pathway we construct: How can we, as discourse analysts, deal with the temporal–spatial horizon of history in view of the accelerated and ephemeral time-space references we experience nowadays? This question reflects our concern with the challenges that contemporary chronotopes pose to discourse analysis.

This paper explores the “crybaby/snowflake” name calling leveled by Trump’s supporters against his detractors, a discourse that exploded in the immediate wake of the 2016 election. It explores interdiscursive (or intertextual) relationships and functional similarities between the crybaby discourse and the language historically used by Drill Instructors during basic training in the United States Marine Corps. In both cases, someone in the role of “ritual elder” uses language as a punitive and didactic cudgel to weed out the weak (whether literally, from the military, or more symbolically, from cultural citizenship/the nation) while signifying that the interlocutor needs to “grow up” or “man up” by attenuating their sensitivity to both suffering and linguistic meaning. The ideal citizen then has a calloused quality, in the model of military masculinity, ready to face harsh realities and to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. The crybaby discourse is intended to discredit political opposition and discourage empathy as part of Trump’s new nationalism. Its interdiscursive passage between military personnel and American conservatives can be seen in memes and mass media. The crybaby discourse has also been taken up by many of Trump’s detractors and leveled at Trump himself to infantilize and discredit him.

Introducing the volume to come, this chapter explains the need for new approaches to the study of literary and cultural interactions in the Roman empire that cross linguistic, cultural and religious boundaries. It begins with a brief overview of the diversity of cross-cultural interactions that can be traced, on and off the page, between different individuals and communities in the second century CE. It analyses current and innovative methodologies for studying ‘intertextuality’ in different disciplines, including approaches that amplify gaps or silences, as well as instances of dialogue/cross-fertilisation. It then stresses three ways in which the volume particularly aims to contribute: firstly, by including technical, documentary, epigraphic and oral material in its wide-ranging study of ‘literary’ interactivity; secondly, by stressing the relationship between textual interaction, cultural practices and material aspects of empire; thirdly, by working out from intertextuality to interdiscursivity, shining a spotlight on the migration of ideas as well specific interactions. The introduction ends with a case study – the story of Arion and the dolphin, retold by many ancient authors – that exemplifies the processes of cross-cultural travel and transmission in the ancient world and also the challenges that scholars face in tracing and interpreting such cross-cultural interactions.

This Afterword brings Jewish evidence from the imperial period into the discussion of intertextuality in the Roman world as a way to underscore and at times challenge the themes animating the volume as a whole. Focusing on the problem of how to read silences and aporiae, it homes in on the observation made by Uden in the volume that many groups in the long second century shared in common a habit of defining themselves as sui generis, ‘projecting an artificial sense of isolation from others’. The early rabbis were masters of this sort of imagined recusal from the historical cultural landscape into their own internal categories genres and narratives, despite the reality of their participation in the Roman world. Pushing farther, the Afterword posits that rabbinic literature in some ways writes intertextuality large – by restricting itself to commentarial genres, the fiction of revelation, and refusal of authorship, the corpus strips itself of the apparatus of literary originality and ownership. In so doing it manifests explicitly what all literature implicitly is: intertextual, collaborative, connective. In its exaggerated posture of isolation, despite the fact of its embeddedness, rabbinic literature claims its place as part of the Roman bookshelf of the second century.