Keynote Talks

I will review how Husserlian phenomenology has influenced thedevelopment of “the science of human language”, linguistics, since its recognized inception at the beginning of the 20th century, to the present. While major proponents of linguistics, including Chomsky and Lakoff, have regularly tried to portray it as a natural science, on a par with physics and biology, I will show how, from Saussure, through Jakobson, to cognitive semiotics, investigations into the nature of individual languages, language users, and the nature of language as a phenomenon have emphasized its fundamental interconnectedness with consciousness. In doing so, they have made use of concepts and methods from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty andothers, to help explicate the key role of (a) the (embodied) speakingsubject, (b) the character of language as a semiotic system, (c) the socialinteraction, and the dynamic relations between these three.

Marlene Johansson Falck

Metaphorical scenes in interdisciplinary research

Human thought processes are largely metaphorical, systematically structured, and grounded in our bodily experiences of the world. Scholars of conceptual metaphor have long argued that these thought processes involve mappings between different cognitive domains, which are reflected in language. However, linguistic patterns indicate that more specific conceptual mappings are at play, incorporating speakers’ encyclopedic experiences of the concepts they refer to with the words and phrases they use. Whether literal or metaphorical, linguistic expressions reflect highly complex, dynamic, and encyclopedic conceptualizations in speakers’ minds and evoke equally intricate conceptualizations in listeners’ or readers’ minds. Therefore, metaphorical expressions are not merely lexical or reflections of cross-domain mappings. They reflect and evoke metaphorical conceptualizations or scenes, involving speakers’ metaphorical understandings of the experiences and concepts denoted by language. In this presentation, I will explore how analyzing the metaphorical scenes evoked by metaphorical expressions can be beneficial across interdisciplinary fields, including corpus linguistics, language learning, psychotherapy, and popular science. Focusing on this more specific level of conceptual abstraction is necessary for capturing the complex patterns inherent in metaphorical meaning, thereby enabling a richer understanding across disciplines.