Metaphor, Language, and Thought
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
The course builds a rich understanding of language and communication in the context of how people conceptualize the world they function in. It shows how they use linguistic and visual forms to construct new meanings and develop new communicative forms. Specifically, materials to be studied show the important roles played by figurative expressions in all types of communication. In the theoretical discussions, we will use recent approaches to meaning to show how underlying cognitive concepts structure our understanding of language, literature, and art, but also artifacts of popular culture, advertising, media, or various forms of internet discourse. In class, we will devote much attention to close analysis of texts and other cultural artifacts. First, we will establish the primary concepts: metaphor, metonymy, and blending – three major types of conceptual structures. In the second part, we will expand the range of our discussions to grammatical phenomena, cross-linguistic facts, and, most prominently, discourse types. Students will be required to grasp the theoretical concepts and use them in their own analyses of data samples. All assignments will rely primarily on analytical skills.
