On November 26, 2021, Zoltán Kövecses,Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder,delivered his first lecture to the teachers and students of School of Foreign Languages viaZoomandTencent Meeting at 11a.m.He is scheduled to give five lectures aboutExtending Extended CMTfrom November 22 to November 26, 2021. The last lectureentitledEmbodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theorywas hosted by Prof. Chaojun Yang, Dean of School of Foreign Languages. Over 300 postgraduates and faculty members all over the world joined the lecture with interest and excitement.
Prof. Zoltán Kövecses, granted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, received his Ph.D. and D.Sc. from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 1988 and 1996, respectively. He is currently working on thelanguage 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. 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.
The contents of these five distinguished lectures can be summarized as follows: (1) InLecture 1ofAnger in American English 40 Years Later, Lakoff and ProfessorKövecsesbegan to work on the concept of anger in American English almost 40 years ago. ProfessorKövecseswould like to survey how he have revised the initial analysis over the years and arrived at a new conception in the light of some recent findings as laid out in his book, Extended Conceptual Theory (2020).(2) InLecture 2ofForce Dynamics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Emotion Concepts, ProfessorKövecsesoutlines an account of the relationship between Talmy’s force dynamics (FD) and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). ProfessorKövecsessuggests that the two frameworks constitute a natural fit if we use Kövecses’ (2020) multilevel view of metaphor for this purpose, and he uses emotion concepts to demonstrate his suggestions.(3) InLecture 3ofMetaphoric Conceptual Pathways, When we are engaged in metaphorical conceptualization online, we create and comprehend a metaphorical contextual meaning through an expression with a more basic, literal meaning. How does this process happen? ProfessorKövecsesattempts to answer it from the perspective of a cognitive linguist.(4) InLecture 4ofProverbs in Extended CMT, ProfessorKövecsesprovides an account of metaphorical proverbs within the new framework of extended conceptual metaphor theory, or ECMT, for short (Kövecses, 2020). He shows that context plays a very different role in metaphorical proverbs than in non-proverbial uses of metaphor.(5) InLecture 5ofEmbodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Cognitive linguists argue that metaphors (both conceptual and linguistic) are grounded in correlations in experience between abstract and concrete concepts, and, as a result, our metaphorical conceptual system is embodied.
At the end of the lecture, all the audience expressed their acknowledgement for this seminar (IALS-3), and took a photo together withProfessorKövecseson the Zoom Meeting.ProfessorKövecses’s series of these five lectures help the audiencegraspthe general meaning of “Extending Extended CMT”.Thesignificance of international academic exchanges is always strengthened by School of Foreign Languages (HENU), and dozens of international academic lectures are held each year in various disciplines of IALS, which will be updated by many other distinguished academic lectures in the near future.
