This chapter studies the electoral repercussions of the refugee crisis, tentatively showing that in elections close to the epicenter of events, either the right or the radical right were the grand winners from this turbulence. First, we examine the politicization of the issue of migration generally in European party-systems, exploring whether the European crises made the issue of migration more salient, polarizing, or both. Additionally, we track the agents responsible for any shift in migration, the parties who might have augmented their focus on migration issues or shifted their positions considerably on it. Finally, the chapter aims to identify the links between these changes in the supply side, with some parties paying more attention to the migration issue, and the electoral response to it, as voters also became more attuned to it. Overall, we see that a rise in attention to migration seems to have led to a rise of the right across Europe, concluding that the refugee crisis had a lasting impact on political balance.

We learn about what matters from exemplars. But we learn more from exemplars than we can be taught, and we know more about them than we can say. The challenge of articulating that knowledge is what drives scholarly inquiry forward. Our epistemological mythology confuses those efforts to express that knowledge propositionally with the knowledge itself. Propositional representations of our knowledge are the currency of scholarly debate; there is no alternative. These representations attempt to distill clusters of salient features that we perceive an exemplar as exemplifying, features that seem to us to matter most for our understanding of the relevant phenomenon. The more precisely we can render these features, the more they stand out and demand our attention. As we endeavor to produce ever finer-grained articulations, we inadvertently exclude other features, features which themselves might eventually emerge as salient and which thus call for fundamental revisions in how we represent what we know.

In Chapter 5, we discuss the processing components that underlie the perspective-taking analogy that we articulated in Chapter 2. This analysis makes it clear that the retrieval of personal knowledge and experience is critical, and we review some of what is known about episodic retrieval and how it can be used in this context. In forming an analogy, one must be able to identify how elements of the story world are related to corresponding elements in one’s own experience. To understand this process, we discuss how readers must construct similarity relations. Finally, we discuss the mechanics of analogy formation per se and describe the notion of a structural mapping between the reader and the character that underlies the perspective-taking analogy. We close out Chapter 5 with a discussion of perspective-taking dynamics. This includes an illustration of how perspective taking can be driven by the events of the story world or evaluations of the character. As we make clear, perspective taking is an ongoing process that can unfold in a variety of ways over the course of reading a narrative.

Why people do or do not change their beliefs has been a long-standing puzzle. Sometimes people hold onto false beliefs despite ample contradictory evidence; sometimes they change their beliefs without sufficient reason. Here, I propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes of holding it. Outcomes can be internal (e.g., positive/negative feelings) or external (e.g., material gain/loss), and only some are dependent on belief accuracy. Belief change can then be understood as an economic transaction, in which the multidimensional utility of the old belief is compared against that of the new belief. Change will occur when potential outcomes alter across attributes, for example due to changing environments, or when certain outcomes are made more or less salient.

The chapter presents the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to communication that serves as a theoretical frame for intercultural pragmatics. SCA was developed to explain the specific features of intercultural interactions and thus offers an alternative to the Gricean approaches that can be considered monolingual theories. There are two important claims that distinguish SCA from other pragmatic theories. First, SCA emphasizes that cooperation and egocentrism are not antagonistic features of communication. While (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience that refers to the relative importance or prominence of information and signs. Second, SCA claims that pragmatic theories have tried to describe the relationship of the individual and social factors by putting too much emphasis on idealized language use, and focusing on cooperation, rapport, and politeness while paying less attention to the untidy, messy, poorly organized and impolite side of communication. SCA pays equal attention to both sides. The first part of the chapter explains the main tenets of SCA. The second part discusses how context, common ground and salience are intertwined in meaning creation and comprehension. The chapter closes with suggestions for future research.

The rapid development of robotics and intelligent systems raises the issue of how to adapt the legal framework to accidents arising from devices based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In the light of the numerous legal studies published in recent years, it is clear that ‘tort law and AI’ has become one of the hot topics of legal scholarship both in national and comparative contexts.

Tort law has a number of systems and structures by which the system will be used to address the challenges posed by AI technologies. It will not be necessary to significantly alter our understanding of tort law’s foundations to be ready for AI, and this may significantly and potentially affect AI innovation and utilization.

Newspapers as the main media of political coverage continue to be primary outlets for reports and opinions on collectively binding decisions. Following a quantitative research strategy, this chapter introduces a new methodological approach that allows us to systematically capture media attention and public salience of court decisions. It provides insight into a new dataset for newspaper coverage of more than 4,000 CJEU decisions in eight EU quality newspapers. The chapter describes the data collection process, the structure of the data, and the opportunities for quantitative analysis. Moreover, it emphasizes the general applicability of this methodological approach for a large number of court cases across a longer time period. The collected data offers new insights into media attention to CJEU cases and various opportunities for future analysis. The contribution also reflects on limitations, strengths, and weaknesses of this quantitative approach of studying the CJEU, compared to other approaches presented in the volume.

This chapter presents an overview of heritage speakers’ linguistic outcomes with the goal of bringing some answers to longstanding debates in contact linguistics. Of special interest are mechanisms of contact-induced change such as convergence and grammaticalization, the role of transfer and priming in those processes, and whether or not these processes lead to simplification or complexification in heritage grammars. Overall, the evidence in the literature favors the argument that syntactic material rarely gets transferred, and that patterns of convergence toward the dominant language are a byproduct of other mechanisms. Contrary to proponents of the theory that social factors take a secondary role in contact-induced grammaticalization, it has also revealed that contact-induced grammaticalization processes in heritage grammars are dependent on the social dynamics of the community. While priming may lead to converge, such effects are also heavily dependent on the social dynamics of the heritage speakers. Results also indicate that patterns of simplification and complexification are intrinsically linked to usage. The discussion makes a call for more work considering intersubjective factors in the study of heritage grammars, in an attempt to better understand the relationship between linguistic systems and social structures.

The sociocognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics initiated by Kecskes integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and emphasizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents. While cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience. In the SCA, communication is considered a dynamic process, in which individuals are not only constrained by societal conditions but also shape them at the same time. Interlocutors are considered as social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a sociocultural collectivity. As a consequence, the communicative process is characterized by the interplay of two sets of traits that are inseparable, mutually supportive and interactive. Individual traits (prior experience > salience > egocentrism > attention) interact with societal traits (actual situational experience > relevance > cooperation > intention). Each trait is the consequence of the other.Prior experience results in salience, which leads to egocentrism that drives attention. Intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance, which (partly) depends on actual situational experience.

Chapter 8 offers a development of thinking about social influence by considering the role of modern mass mediation. The chapter starts by looking at the role of communication in cultivating social representations of the world, both in formal and informal ways. It proceeds by reviewing several hypotheses concerning mass media effects, including diffusion, knowledge gap, cultivation, diegetic prototyping and serial reproduction. The chapter further considers the extended role of mass mediation in agenda setting, priming and framing issues for public consumption. The idea of a 'spiral of silence' best illustrates how mass media effect analysis adds a second level of analysis to the phenomena of social influence: the theory explicitly elaborates the notion of conformity in the context of modern mass mediation. Hence, the chapter asks a question rather than offering the answer: how do media effect theories elaborate social influence simultaneously on two levels, that of interaction and that of mass mediation. For example, how does this tie in with the rediscovery of crowds as 'internet bubbles' and 'echo chambers dominated by conformity bias and motivated reasoning'?

This chapter examines and compares the effects of issue characteristics on the nine blame games examined in Chapters 3-5 and consults three additional test cases in the USA in order to corroborate and refine the findings. The chapter demonstrates how issue characteristics – namely the salience of a policy controversy and its proximity to average publics – influence the content of blame game interactions. Issue characteristics influence how political opponents signal the severity of a policy controversy to the public, how they can try to put incumbents under pressure, and how incumbents seek to manage blame for the controversy. This chapter clarifies what is meant by blame games being played out in front of an ‘audience’, and it shows how politicians work with issue characteristics to pull the audience onto their side.