Keynote speakers

Jeannette Littlemore (University of Birmingham)

Ambiguous metaphoricity and emotional experiences: Allowing room for flexibility

People’s experiences of metaphor can operate at different levels. When they employ metaphor, they may, in some cases, simply be talking about something as if it were something else. In other cases, they may actually be experiencing it as if it were something else, and in other cases they may actually believe that it is something else. These three levels of experience feed into each other and are often difficult to disentangle. Crucially, it is possible, under some circumstances for people to experience a phenomenon as both literal and metaphorical at the same time, especially in the aftermath of traumatic experiences. The merging of literal and metaphorical meanings and experiences can arise as a direct consequence of such experiences and it can also serve as a coping mechanism to help people come to terms with their trauma.

In this paper I outline work I have conducted alone and with others, exploring different areas of human experience where this phenomenon arises: bereavement following pregnancy loss or the death of a child; the experience of childhood abuse relating to faith and belief; and the development of schizophrenic delusions in response to childhood trauma.

Drawing on data from interviews with people who have experienced these situations, I show how individuals conflate literal and metaphorical meanings in an attempt to reconcile the contradictory realities that they are experiencing. I argue that it is important for those who support people in these situations to acknowledge that concurrent realities can coexist and to accept that an experience can be both literal and metaphorical at the same time. Attempting to categorise an experience as either literal or metaphorical can be misleading, and at times detrimental for those involved.

Author Bio:

Jeannette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the role played by figurative language in the sharing of emotional experiences. She also explores the role played by metaphor and metonymy in language learning and cross-cultural communication. Recent publications include: Metaphors in the Mind: Sources of Variation in Embodied Metaphor (CUP, 2019), Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought and Communication (CUP, 2015); and Figurative Language, Genre and Register (with Alice Deignan and Elena Semino, CUP, 2013).

Herbert L. Colston (University of Alberta)

Seeing metaphor in context: New insights from a family of meaning-makers

Metaphor as a scholarly topic, is often looked at in isolation. Whether for documentation purposes of finding all the places metaphor resides, and any possible ramifications of that landscape, or to better understand the functionality and theoretical bedrock and scaffolding of metaphor, as related to cognition, embodiment, multimodality, acquisition/development, social functioning and other facets, we often still look at metaphor by itself.

Recent work has begun to show, however, that some keen insights can be had about metaphor, by noting its position amid a broader family of meaning-making devices (Colston, 2015; 2019; 2023; in press, Colston & Rasse, 2022; 2024). These insights involve the range of numbers of invoked “domains” by figures, the variety of mechanisms and processes domain juxtapositions can invoke, the broad array of pragmatic functions figures attempt to tackle, the social operating system on which all these figures run, and others.

The current presentation follows in this vein of putting metaphor in context with a consideration of three additional insights. The first arises from a comparison of metaphor and other tropes, against a cast of puns, poetry, and prose, and an ensuing caste of aboutness. The second is a revisitation of the tendency toward two, regarding the number of domains typically evoked by metaphor and other figures. And the final insight arises from looking at the metaphoricity of metaphor itself. How we think of metaphor, metaphorically as a concept, and some possibly ensuing framings which might be blindsiding some of our research

Author Bio:

Herbert L. Colston is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research investigates figurative language, multimodality, poetics, and embodiment in language use and comprehension. He has authored three books, How Language Makes Meaning: Embodiment and Conjoined Antonymy (2019), Using Figurative Language (2015), and Interpreting Figurative Meaning (2012, with Raymond Gibbs), all with Cambridge University Press. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Metaphor and Symbol (Taylor & Francis) and co-edits the John Benjamins book series Figurative Thought and Language with Angeliki Athanasiadou

Annalisa Baicchi (University of Pavia)

Patterns of creativity in language and thought: A look at proverbs and snowclones

Humans are skilled meaning makers: We are endowed with the peculiar ability to shape semiotic signs and carve new messages out of vast stores of knowledge. This is even more evident when it comes to expressing ideas by kneading old phrases into new creative patterns, a kind of linguistic dexterity that emerges from complex cognitive processes (Athanasiadou 2017; Littlemore 2019).

This talk aims to illustrate how traditional proverbs and snowclones resemble “the pizzas of figurative language” (Colston 2019: 97), with the ingredients being stirred and moulded into a series of constructional patterns and licensed by complex conceptualisations.

The analysis of proverbs will illustrate how their understanding is motivated by figurative thinking, mainly through metaphorical conceptualisation (e.g. the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC mapping, Lakoff & Turner 1989) of everyday experience, but also through hyperbole or personification (Gibbs, Colston & Johnson 1996), e.g., ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket‘ is motivated by the metaphors LIFE IS A CONTAINER and BELIEFS ARE PHYSICAL POSSESSIONS. Although proverbs are structurally fixed, making them easy to remember, they can be modified according to the communicative needs of the speakers (Fernando 2000). Proverb variation is the creative manipulation of a piece of language that must fit the context, for example, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away‘ can be modified into ‘A laugh a day keeps the doctor away‘ or ‘A spritz a day keeps skeeters away‘ (from COCA). The modified versions of the traditional proverb retain the syntactic pattern while filling it with new lexis; the interpretation is metaphorically motivated in that language users rely on cross-mappings between the target domain and the more familiar source domain.

Linguistic and cognitive creativity is well represented by snowclones, a type of phrasal template that is “a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants” (Pullum 2004). Three criteria define snowclones: (i) a lexically filled source construction; (ii) partial productivity; (iii) ‘extravagant’ formal and/or functional characteristics (Hartmann & Ungerer 2023). Snowclones are cases of partial (i.e. constrained to various degrees) productivity of linguistic constructions (Goldberg 2019), for example, the ‘not the ADJest N1 in the N2’ construction is creatively shaped into ‘He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer’ and ‘She’s not the sweetest candy in the box’ (Traugott & Trousdale 2016). Cognitively speaking, people can interpret these semi-schematic constructions relying on the association of ‘sharpest’ with intelligence and on the metaphorical reading of ‘sweet’ as pleasantness.

Author Bio:

Annalisa Baicchi is Full Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at University of Genoa, Italy. Her main research interests lie in the areas of Cognitive linguistics, Construction Grammar, Contrastive Linguistics, and Inferential Pragmatics. Her main publications include Construction Learning as a Complex Adaptive System (Springer), Figurativity We Live By. The Cognitive Underpinnings and Mechanisms of Figurativity in Language (Textus), Figurative Meaning Construction in Thought and Language (Benjamins), Sensory Perceptions in Language, Embodiment, and Epistemology (Springer).

Raymond W. Gibbs

Are Myths Really Metaphors?

Classic myths are stories that graphically depict complex dramas involving humans and suprahuman entities, including various gods. Many scholars across history argue that myths convey metaphorical meaning, mostly because of their descriptions of various Gods (e.g., Poiseden for the sea, Thor for thunder and lightning) in which one thing (e.g., lightning) is understood in terms of the actions of another (e.g., Thor). My presentation more closely examines whether mythical narratives may be constituted via metaphorical thought. There are many ways in which mythical tales do not appear to exhibit the qualities we usually associate with metaphor. Yet myths also may, in different contexts, be understood to convey allegorical meanings, primarily through automatic embodied simulation processes in which people imagine themselves participating in the actions, in this case, depicted in mythical narratives. It is through embodied simulation processes that people come to understand the larger symbolic meanings of myths. One important conclusion is that our search for metaphor, in myths and elsewhere, is not solely a matter of finding it within language through objective analyses. Instead, what is deemed metaphorical always depends on who the person is that is interpreting a narrative, their personal and historical background, the present social context, their specific understanding tasks, and their complex beliefs about, in this case, Gods and the mythological worlds they inhabit.

Author Bio:

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. is an independent cognitive scientist and former Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests focus on embodied cognition, pragmatics and figurative language. He is the author of many books, including “The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language and understanding” (1994), “Intentions in the experience of meaning” (1999), “Embodiment and cognitive science” (2006), “Metaphor wars: Conceptual metaphor in human life” (2017), (with Herb Colston) “Interpreting figurative meaning” (2012), and “Oue metaphorical bodies: Why metaphor may be everywhere” (2025), all published by Cambridge University Press.