On the afternoon of May 28, 2020, Professor Zoltán Kövecses(佐尔坦•克韦切什), Emeritus Professor atEötvös Loránd University(ELTE), deliveredhisfirst lecture to the teachers and students of School of Foreign Languages via Tencent Meetingand Skype. He is scheduled to give five lectures aboutStandardConceptual Metaphor Theory(SCMT) from May 28 to June 25, 2020. The first lecture intitled“TheHistory and Basic Ideas of CMT”was hosted by Prof. Yang Chaojun, Dean of School of Foreign Languages. Nearly 260 postgraduatesandfaculty members joined the lecture with interest and excitement.
In the course of thislecture, theHistory and Basic Ideas of CMT,was introduced byProf.Kövecses. Based on his own educational experiences in UC Berkeley, he first elaborated on the development of CMT marked by the publication ofsomeacademic works by prominent scholars,such as Lakoff and Johnson(Metaphors We Live By, 1980).Based on Prof.Kövecses’s lecture,ConceptualMetaphor was defined as“understanding one domain of experience (that is typically abstract) in terms of another (that is typically concrete)”. Then,Prof. Kövecsesexplained the definition according to his study of emotion language and that of the nature of emotion concepts. Meanwhile, he also characterized conceptual metaphor from the perspective of culture, embodiment, cross-disciplinary etc. Two important methodologies on conceptual metaphor were then emphasized:neuroscientific approach and computational approach. Finally, he concluded that pervasive metaphors contribute to the idiomaticity and polysemy of English words, while technically“it is a systematic set of correspondences between two domains of experience”.
Prof. Kövecses’s thought-provoking lecture offersus the penetratingandinsightful ideas inConceptualMetaphorTheory(CMT).His passion, humor and experiences spark students interest inCMTand its applications invarious areas.
He is one of the four editors of the international scholarly journal,Metaphor and Symbol, the co-editor ofCognitive Linguistic Studies,the associate editor ofCognitive Linguistics, and he also serves as the member of advisory board ofReview of Cognitive Linguistics. He is currently working on the language and conceptualization of emotions, cross-cultural variation in metaphor, and the issue of the relationship between language, mind, and culture from a cognitive linguistic perspective.His mainpublications includeExtended Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CambridgeUniversityPress, 2020),Where Metaphors Come From. Reconsidering Context in Metaphor, (CambridgeUniversityPress, 2015) and so on.In a nutshell, Prof.Kövecses has published more than 100 papers and 20 books in the field of cognitive linguistics.
(Authors: Li Pandeng, Zhang Jie)
