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Conceptual Blending and the Rhetorical Triangle in Michael Cohen’s Congressional Testimony

( ) Occasional Papers Vol. 67: July (2019) ISSN 1110-2721 Conceptual Blending and the Rhetorical Triangle in Michael Cohen’s Congressional Testimony Dalia M. Hamed Lecturer of Linguistics Faculty of Education, Tanta University, Egypt. Abstract This paper analyzes the application of Conceptual Blending as proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and the rhetorical triangle proposed by Aristotle to examine Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony (former attorney for President Donald Trump). Cohen testifies against President Trump aiming to convince members of the Congress that Trump misled him. It is assumed that language in such a formal situation should be simple and logical. Results prove that Cohen employs conceptual blending to create new effective structures and appeals more to passion instead of logic. Blending, as a linguistic tool, is to be skillfully employed according to the current situation. Appealing to passion through doublescope blending is a linguistic style suitable among family members and close friends. Formal settings, such as The Congress or any institutional setting, require simple words appealing to reason and logic. Misplaced blends result in undesirable effects. Cohen’s utterances, mostly containing emotional language items serving as being components of blending, have lost their persuasive effect due to the misplaced mappings between linguistic choices.