Guest lectures: Professor Klaus-Uwe Panther, 5-8 March

PhD Programme in English: Language, Society, Technology and Cognition (LST&C) funded by the European Social Fund has the honour to invite staff and students of the Faculty of English to lectures by prof. Klaus-Uwe Panther (Nanjing Normal University; University of Hamburg). The lectures will be held on Tuesday, 5 March, at 1:15 p.m. in 601A, Wednesday, 6 March, at 6:30 p.m. in 602A and Friday, 8 March, at 1:30 p.m. in 601A. In addition, there will be a meeting with staff and students (everyone is welcome) on Thursday, 7 March, at 4:30 p.m. in 615A.

Lexical meanings form networks of senses, which are related through relations such as synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and antonymy. Among these, antonymy might be the most salient sense relation. Psycholinguistic tests have shown that the word most frequently associated with a given stimulus word is one with an opposite meaning. Furthermore, antonymy manifests itself on various levels of linguistic organization and function, some of which are explored in this presentation. It will be shown that antonymic contrasts are a rich conceptual resource that impacts both language structure and use. The linguistic phenomena presented and discussed in this talk range from the function and meaning of antonymous words in various constructions and antonymic clashes between lexical meaning and constructional meaning to their rhetorical use in oxymora, irony, and sarcasm.
 

Wednesday, 6 March, 6:30 p.m., 602A
Culturally motivated animal metaphors in an expressive construction

This talk presents an in-depth analysis of the pattern a N1 of a N2, which exhibits an interesting case of constructional homonymy. On the one hand, there is the more frequent “unmarked” construction exemplified by noun phrases such as a copy of a magazine; on the other hand, one finds the less frequent “marked” construction instantiated by a nailbiter of a campaign (CNN anchor commenting on the Obama-Romney race, October 24, 2012) – termed ‘expressive’ in this presentation. The two homonymous constructions exhibit the same surface syntax, but they differ considerably in conceptual content, pragmatic function, and emotivity. The goal of this presentation is to make the case that the expressive construction is at least partially motivated by cultural factors, pointing to the necessity of integrating cultural models into the description and explanation of lexicogrammar.

The aim of this talk is to make a case for motivation as an explanatory concept in linguistic theorizing. Motivation is often discarded by formalist linguists as an unscientific concept. Indeed, explanations in terms of motivation are not nomological-deductive, but despite this “deficiency”, I will argue that in the human sciences, in particular linguistics, the notion of motivation is indispensable. Following and elaborating a concept of motivation proposed by Radden & Panther (2004), Panther & Radden (2011), and Panther (2013), data are presented that are arguably best accounted for on the basis of motivational factors. In this respect, my presentation accords with what Langacker (2008: 14) says about the ubiquity of motivation in language: “Cognitive and functional linguists find that virtually everything in language is motivated [...] (even if very little is strictly predictable).”