CCL 3

Culture and Cognition in Language 3

27-28 April, 2023

The Department of English Studies at the University of Rzeszów has the pleasure of announcing the third edition of the conference Culture and Cognition in Language: CCL 3. The conference is aimed at viewing language as a both cultural and cognitive phenomenon. This year’s leading theme is:

Figurativeness in language and beyond

While twentieth-century mainstream linguistic theories emphasized the uniqueness and autonomy of language, Cognitive Linguistics has always viewed language as part of cognition. Consequently, it is well-suited to pay due attention both to linguistic and to non-linguistic forms of communication; to places where the two complement each other and compete for attention. This was signalled already by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) but it took over a decade to materialize (Forceville 1996, 2010, Górska 2020).

As a matter of fact, the increased interest in multimodal communication among cognitive linguists may be seen as part of a broader phenomenon labelled “the multimodal turn” (Goodling 2014), a growing awareness of a need to acknowledge the extra-linguistic aspects of communication among researchers coming from various backgrounds. However, as pointed out by Bateman et. al (2017: 15), multimodality is not the invention of modern society; it “needs to be seen as always having been the norm”. The significance of other forms and channels of communication had long been recognized in semiotic studies and – more recently – within cognitive semiotics (Zlatev 2015, Stampoulidis et al. 2019).

In view of this, we wish to contribute to the discussion by providing the conference participants with an opportunity to present the results of their research and exchange their views on metaphor, metonymy and other tropes used in various monomodal and multimodal settings. For example, we would like to encourage studies on the interplay between (visual) metaphors and context (see Kövecses 2020) and the occurrence of multimodal image-schematic metaphors in various types of discourse (see Górska 2020). Besides, we intend to focus on the function of different multimodal tropes across various genres, such as pedagogical books, advertisements, films, cartoons, social media, etc. We also welcome insights into the very concept of a mode as well as the place of semiotics in modern research on communication.

References:

Bateman, John, Janina Wildfeuer and Tuomo Hiippala (2017). Multimodality. Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.

Forceville, Charles (1996). Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London: Routledge.

Forceville, Charles (2010). Why and how study metaphor, metonymy, and other tropes in multimodal discourse? In A. S. da Silva, J. C. Martins, L. Magalhaes & M. Goncalves (eds.), Comunicação, Cognição e Media. Braga: Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, 41–60.

Goodling, L. B. (2014), The multimodal turn in higher education: On teaching, assessing, valuing multiliteracies, Pedagogy 14(3), 561–568.

Górska, Elżbieta (2020).  Understanding Abstract Concepts across Modes in Multimodal Discourse. New York: Routledge.

Kövecses, Zoltan (2020). Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stampoulidis, Georgios, Marianna Bolognesi and Jordan Zlatev (2019). A cognitive semiotic exploration of metaphors in Greek street art. Cognitive Semiotics, 12(1), 2019, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2019-2008

Zlatev, Jordan (2015) Cognitive semiotics. In P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer, 1043–1067.