On the afternoon of November 15, 2019, the lecture entitled “Constraints of Figure of Speech” given by Professor Ruiz de Mendoza marked the end of First International Academic Week of School of Foreign Languages. From November 11 to November 15, 2019, the knowledgeable and distinguished scholar delivered 5 lectures, covering a wide range of topics on “conceptual metaphor theory”, “basic and non-basic figures of speech”, “complexity in the ironic echo”, “constraints of figure of speech”etc. Over 100 graduates, faculty members and doctoral students across the nation attended those sessions with enthusiasm and had fruitful discussions with the Spanish scholar.
Prof. Ruiz de Mendoza introduced general constraints and figure-specific constraints of figurative language use during to answer the question of what prevents the overgeneration of metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, etc. during his final lecture. There are generally three principles, emphasized by Prof. Mendoza, to solve the overgeneration problem of figurative language, namely, invariance principle(IP), extended invariance principle(EIP), and correlation principle(CP), in which the first principle was proposed by Lakoff in 1993, and the rest two were developed by Mendoza in 1998 and in 2014. In contrast with IP, Professor Mendoza asserted that EIP stresses the preservation of all generic-level structure besides image-schematic structure across domains in a metaphoric mapping. Then, the scholar continued to illustrate the applications of EIP and CP to figures of speech such as metonymy, hyperbole, understatement, irony. In the end, followed by his elaboration on figure-specific constraints: scalar symmetry, scalar pragmatic adjustment, maximization of echo, Prof. Mendoza also answered questions raised by PhD students and graduates.
Professor Ruiz de Mendoza is a world-famous cognitive linguist on figurative language. His deep insights into conceptual metaphors and figures of speech have broadened graduates’ horizon and enriched their knowledge on cognitive linguistics. All the audience enjoyed his justification of arguments with humorous remarks and metaphorical language during illustration.(author: Li Pandeng)
