Topics in Cognitive Linguistics: Figuration, applied cognitive linguistics, constructions, cognitive poetics, emotions and culture specificity
Contact person: Angeliki Athanasiadou, angath@enl.auth.gr
The aim of the theme session is to discuss central “islands” of the Cognitive Linguistics framework and attempt to build “bridges” between them. One island is figurative language, metaphor and metonymy in particular; these are central cognitive mechanisms deeply entrenched in speakers’ conceptualization. They are reflected in verbal and non-verbal ways. Teaching conceptual metaphors in foreign languages aims to facilitate the acquisition of areas of grammar. Grammatical constructions, coherent patterns of any type, (string of words or morphemes, clauses, phrases, complex lexemes) exhibit semantic and pragmatic potential. Cognitive poetics is another island that employs cognitive linguistics tools to analyse literary works. The language of emotion concepts is figuratively expressed to a large extent, its function in discourse is investigated and it certainly draws from the culture within which it is expressed.
The proposed theme session includes ten abstracts investigating the following topics:
- Figurative language in political discourse: verbal and multimodal metaphors (three papers)
- Application of the cognitive linguistic framework to foreign language teaching and to teaching metaphor so as to raise EFL learners’ metaphor awareness (two papers)
- Constructions and their pragmatic effects (one paper)
- Cognitive poetics (one paper)
- Language of emotions in discourse in a culture-specific framework (three papers)