“The Speech That Stunned Europe”

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

Cognition · Democracy · Vice president · Discourse Analysis and Cultural Communication · Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition