International Conference: English Language and Literature Studies
From 23 to 24 October 2015 the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade organizes the 5th International Conference of the English Department: ‘English Language and Literature Studies: Tradition and Transformation’.
The aim of the ELLSTAT conference is to promote exchange of ideas across different areas and theoretical frameworks of English linguistics and anglophone literary/cultural studies throughout a broad academic community.
The list of plenary speakers will include:
– Elizabeth Archibald (Professor of English Studies, Durham University, UK)
– Istvan Kecskes (Professor of Linguistics and Communication, State University of New York, Albany, USA)
– Gerard Steen (Professor of Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, NL)
For more information, see the call for papers.
Life, metaphor, and beer:
The future of Deliberate Metaphor Theory
Gerard Steen
University of Amsterdam
Over the past few decades, metaphor research has been revolutionized by the cognitive-linguistic approach launched by Lakoff and Johnson (1980): they claim that metaphor is not the special privilege of poets, politicians, and patients, involving strange language use, but that instead metaphor forms part of the foundation of our thought which is reflected in highly frequent conventional metaphorical language use. This revolution has yielded an impressive amount of research across a wide range of disciplines (cf. Gibbs, 2008), emphasizing the conceptual power of automatic metaphor use in any abstract or complex domain of thought that people need to negotiate. What has been neglected in this approach is the fact that it is still possible for some metaphors to be used in non-automatic and special ways, as precisely happens in for instance poetry or political rhetoric. In recent years I have therefore developed an extended version of this theory, emphasizing that not all metaphor in language is an automatic reflection of conceptual metaphors in thought, but that some metaphors are used deliberately as metaphors in communication for specific communicative purposes (e.g., Steen, 2008, 2011a).
In this talk I will develop the most important aspects of Deliberate Metaphor Theory and address its implications for Conceptual Metaphor Theory (cf. Gibbs, 2015a, b; Steen, 2015). I will do so by engaging with a commercial for Bavaria beer in which the members of the Austrian band Opus are trying to come up with an apt metaphor for their hit song to be ‘Life is life’. In analyzing the details of this commercial I hope to show that we need a multi-dimensional perspective on metaphor in language use, comprising metaphor in language, thought, and communication, which requires multiple disciplinary perspectives for analysis and makes interesting predictions for metaphor processing. This approach may even lead to the conclusion that there is a paradox of metaphor, in that most metaphor is not processed metaphorically. The solution to this paradox is offered by Deliberate Metaphor Theory, as I hope to show in this talk.
References
Gibbs, R.W., jr. 1994. The poetics of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, R.W., jr. 2015a. Do pragmatic signals affect conventional metaphor understanding? A failed test of deliberate metaphor theory. Journal of Pragmatics.
Gibbs, R.W., jr. 2015a. Does Deliberate Metaphor Theory have a future? Journal of Pragmatics.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Steen, G.J. 2008. The paradox of metaphor: Why we need a three-dimensional model for metaphor. Metaphor & Symbol 23(4), 213-241.
Steen, G.J. 2011a. The contemporary theory of metaphor—now new and improved! Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9(1), 26-64.
Steen, G.J. 2011. Genre between the humanities and the sciences. In M. Callies, W.R. Keller, & A. Lohöfer (Eds.), Bi-directionality in the cognitive sciences: Examining the interdisciplinary potential of cognitive approaches in linguistics and literary studies (pp. 21-42). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Steen, G.J. 2015. Developing, testing, and interpreting Deliberate Metaphor Theory. Journal of Pragmatics.