| Description: |
In the last decades, the research paradigm of World Englishes has experienced a proliferation of investigations on different aspects of Englishes across the world. However, the field of figurative language use, as manifest e.g. in conceptual metaphors and idioms, has largely been neglected so far (see Polzenhagen & Wolf 2017 and Callies 2017 for review). One of the first studies to explore this terra incognita was Wolf & Polzenhagen’s (2009) cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of African Englishes. Assuming that a language (or a variety of that language) reflects the cultural context of its speech community, first applications of conceptual metaphor theory have highlighted the importance of cultural background knowledge and underlying cultural conceptualizations for the interpretation of lexical domains in World Englishes. Some of these studies have combined the usage-based framework of Cognitive Linguistics with corpus linguistic methods to investigate the expression of culture in several Englishes (e.g. Wolf & Polzenhagen 2007; Sharifian 2008; Polzenhagen & Wolf 2010; Wolf & Chan 2016; and several papers in Callies & Onysko 2017). The English language and its worldwide diversification provides rich potential for exploring if and how the culturally diverse settings in which the many Englishes have formed and are developing influence the use of figurative language. Against this background, this workshop aims to strengthen the link between research on figurative language in Cognitive Linguistics and research on World Englishes, and to make the emerging research in this field more visible. The workshop especially aims to bring together researchers that use large electronic corpora to study the conceptual and linguistic variability of metaphors and idioms across the English-speaking world. Contributions addressing one of the following research questions are particularly invited: - To what extent are electronic corpora such as the ICE (Greenbaum 1996) or the GloWbE (Davies 2013-) viable sources of data to examine metaphors and idioms across World Englishes, and what are state-of-the-art approaches to the identification and retrieval of metaphorical expressions and idioms from corpus data?
- What source and target domains can be identified as fruitful for the study of metaphor and idioms in World Englishes (e.g. the conceptualization of emotions, FOOD / EATING as source domains)?
- Can certain types of figurative language serve as markers of nativization / indigenization in World Englishes (Schneider 2007: 46, 86)?
- How do metaphors and idioms relate to underlying differences in cultural conceptualizations in World Englishes?
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