Zhen Pan visiting scholar at the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam

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Next week, Zhen Pan will arrive in Amsterdam to visit the Metaphor Lab for a couple of months as a visiting scholar.

Zhen Pan, is an English associate professor in School of Foreign Studies, Jiangsu Normal University, China. He has graduated from East China Normal University (ECNU, in Shanghai) with a Ph. D. degree with a dissertation concerning the transmission of traditional Chinese emotions in 2011. He is also a director of Jiangsu Academic Society of Translators and Interpreters, China Cognitive Linguistics Association and China Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese.

His academic interest is cognitive linguistics. And  his research now focuses on emotional constructions and their cognitive mechanism like metaphotonymy. It is a fact that different emotional constructions, with the connotation of profound emotional culture, can be used to express definite human emotions. Therefore, his research begins with the analysis of the language of natural emotions (like happiness, anger, sadness and so on) both in Chinese and English, carries out the comprehensive and in-depth study on the various emotional constructions together with their traditional cultures, and compares and contrasts the Chinese and western transmissions of emotions together with their cognitive and national cultural motives. His research aims at the deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism in emotional languages and the comprehensive construction of emotional culture systems.

On Tuesday 17 November, he will present his work during a research meeting.

Another review of Metaphor in Psychotherapy

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Julia T. Williams Camus, University of Cantabria, Spain reviewed Metaphor in Psychotherapy: A Descriptive and Prescriptive Analysis ( 2013) by Dennis Tay. This book is part of the book series Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication.

You can read the review here!

New article on the role of extendedness in metaphorical framing

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‘How viruses and beasts affect our opinions (or not)’
This is the title of the article by Gudrun Reijnierse, Christian Burgers, Tina Krennmayr
and Gerard Steen on the role of extendedness in metaphorical framing.

“Based on the assumption that extended metaphor may constitute a case of deliberate
metaphor and therefore has the potential to influence people’s opinions,
this paper investigates whether extending a metaphorical frame in a text leads
people to perceive policy measures that are in line with that frame as more effective
for solving a crime problem than other policy measures. The metaphorical
frames ‘Crime is a virus’ and ‘Crime is a beast’ were extended in one experiment
each via a series of additional conventional metaphorical expressions having
crime as the target domain and beasts/viruses as the source domain. Participants
(N = 354, Experiment 1; N = 361, Experiment 2) were randomly assigned to one
of five experimental conditions with increasing numbers of sentences containing
metaphorical expressions, and rated the effectiveness of a set of policy measures
to solve the crime problem described in the text. The data yield limited support
for our hypothesis. When controlling for political affiliation, the ratings for frameconsistent
measures trended in the hypothesised direction in Experiment 2.
Experiment 1 yielded a trend for frame-inconsistent measures. These results suggest
that metaphorical framing effects may be more subtle than has been assumed.”

Anke Beger visits the Metaphor Lab

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Thursday, October 1st, Anke Beger (Flensburg University) will visit Metaphor Lab Amsterdam for a couple of days to talk about the research on deliberate metaphor that she is conducting for her doctoral thesis.

“In my doctoral research, I investigate how professors communicate knowledge in their lectures. Since communicating knowledge on college level primarily involves teaching abstract concepts, and since metaphors, by definition (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson 1980), involve understanding a more abstract domain in terms of a more concrete one, I focus on the professors’ use of metaphors in my analysis.”

On Tuesday 6 October, she will present her work during a research meeting.

4th International Seminar on Metaphor and Discourse

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The IV International Seminar on Metaphor and Discourse will focus especially on the New Cognitive Domains in the 21st Century, but all aspects of metaphor in discourse are objects of study and debate in the Seminar. Following previous editions, the IV International Seminar on Metaphor and Discourse will be held at Universitat Jaume I (UJI), Castelló de la Plana, Spain (3 -4 December 2015).

Contributions are encouraged on all aspects of metaphor and discourse studies, departing from the basic tenets on conceptual metaphor theory already set by landmark publications like Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) up to the more recently emergent trends that deal with the study of metaphor in discourse and thought.

Our aim is to bring together specialists and researchers involved in these research matters in order to discuss recent contributions to the field, as well as to open new debates about the relevance of metaphor in discourse.

The following speakers have so far accepted the invitation to participate in the seminar:

– Dr. Gerard Steen (University of Amsterdam)

– Dr. Elena Semino (University of Lancaster)

– Dr. Zoltán Kövecses (Eötvös Loránd University,  Budapest)

Luzia Goldmann visiting scholar at the Metaphor Lab

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From September to December 2015, Luzia Goldmann will be in Amsterdam as a visiting scholar at the Metaphor Lab. Here, she will be working on her PhD-project “Transfigurations of Metaphor”. With this project, Luzia aims to investigate the explanatory and interpretative potential that contemporary cognitive approaches to metaphor can offer to the research in literary studies. The project is designed as a twofold attempt that takes into account the historical background of the different metaphor theories that are rooted in their contemporary philosophical, linguistic and religious background as well as a systematic perspective on recurring elements and continuous developments of assumptions, arguments and perspectives on metaphor throughout the centuries. During her stay in the Metaphor Lab she aims to gain a better understanding of the scope of current metaphor theories outside the field of literary studies and in how far these different approaches might offer fruitful inspirations for her own field.

She will talk about her project during the Metaphor Lab research meeting (3 November).