On the afternoon of June 4, 2020, Professor Zoltán Kövecses, Emeritus Professor at Eötvös Loránd University, delivered his second lecture to teachers and students of School of Foreign Languages via Tencent Meeting and Skype. The second lecture, entitled “Applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory”, was hosted by Lin YU. Nearly 300 postgraduates and faculty members participated in this academic activity.
During this lecture, Prof. Kövecses focused on Applications of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the three main scopes:American literature(Poetry), modality and visuality,foreign language teaching. He first classified conceptual metaphor roughly into two types: correlation metaphor and resemblance metaphor,according to their different cognitive mechanisms. Then, based on this classification, he applied correlation metaphorstopoetry analysis, taking Robert Frost’sThe Road Not Takenas an example. He also illustrated the motivation of universal metaphors in poems.In addition,three differentsocial-physicalrepresentationsof metaphorsin modality and their applications in quintessential American multimodal metaphors were elaboratedby professor Kövecses. Finally, he alsopresented tous with seven keynotionsin the application of language teaching, including systematicity, motivation, theoretical explicitness,cultural embededness, salience and creativity, followed by sevenguidingprinciples which shouldbeobserved throughmetaphor teaching.
Although restricted by the Internet, students’ enthusiasm for learning has never diminished. Prof. Kövecses’s professional knowledge, insightful thinking and meticulous academic attitude deeply impressed all the teachers and students. Many students said they had greatly developed their understanding in Conceptual Metaphor Theory and its applications in various fields, such as foreign language teaching, literature (poetry) and modality. (Authors: Li Pandeng, Liu Congcong)
