Zoltán Kövecses

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• Phd, DSc
• Professor Emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University

Dates: March of 14 –16, 2025 Format: The online conference will present pre-recorded talks, followed by the Zoom livestreaming of thematic panel sessions. The International Institute of Love Studies invites you to submit proposals for presentations at the Conference on a wide range of love-related topics. The call for proposals is open. The deadli...

In Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Kövecses, 2020), I offered a comprehensive overhaul of “standard” conceptual metaphor theory. The present paper attempts to demonstrate how the new view of CMT can handle metaphorical idioms. To this end, I analyze four metaphorical idioms from the thematic area of money ( throw money about, money slips throu...

The aim of this study is to answer the question as to how the metaphor system of a language belonging to a given language family may be affected when surrounded by languages and cultures of another language family. The languages chosen for this purpose are Hungarian, the only Uralic language spoken in Central Europe, as well as five members of the...

The volume presents an innovative set of researches featuring theoretical and practical discussions of the proverb in cognition and culture. To date, there seems to be a need for state-of-the-art research into this subject matter. This volume aims at responding to this need. The chapters contribute, from a Cognitive Linguistics interdisciplinary pe...

This is an updated version of the paper with the title Cognitive Metaphor.

Cognitive linguistic investigations into the metaphorical conceptualization of anger suggest that languages are remarkably similar on a schematic level, with intensity and control as two, possibly universal dimensions underlying the metaphorical conceptualization of anger. These dimensions, however, can manifest themselves in language-specific meta...

To appear in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Cognitive Linguistics edited by Xu Wen and John Taylor.

Link: https://love-studies-institute.org/call-for-proposals/

Cultures emerged when prehistoric humans began to create imagined realities (i.e., realities that do not exist objectively) (Harari, 2015). These imagined realities are constituted by abstract concepts. As we know from conceptual metaphor theory (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2010), abstract concepts arise from more concrete concep...

This book shows that given the new findings of cognitive linguistics, it is possible to offer a unified account of not only linguistic meaning but also that of meaning in a wide variety of social and cultural phenomena. It is suggested that cognitive linguistics is a much more comprehensive enterprise than is commonly accepted--both inside and outs...

Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, this book explores the analysis of crime-related language. Drawing on ideas from stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and intertextuality, it compares and contrasts the linguistic representation of crime...

The last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language Studies and related fields hav...

Whenever we think about the world – including its concrete and abstract entities – we typically see a series of so-called mental images in front of our eyes that aid us in everyday problem solving and navigating ourselves in the world. Visual metaphors, similarly to their linguistic counterparts, largely build on such images. Nevertheless, the inte...

Why should Jesus die? I attempt to investigate the symbolic roots and significance of the crucifixion by means of the conceptual tools and methodology of cognitive semantics. In particular, I propose that we approach the meaning of Jesus’ death on four symbolic levels: the level where Jesus is a sacrificial lamb; the level where Jesus is a scapegoa...

My goal in the paper is to offer a new perspective on how conceptual metaphors (subsumed under “cognition” in the title) and culture (subsumed under “context” in the title) are related to one another. The view of conceptual metaphors that I employ here is a recent one called “extended conceptual metaphor theory” (Kovecses 2020). The new view is, in...

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? I cannot answer this question as a psychologist or psycholinguist would; I attempt to answer it from the perspective of a cognitive linguist,...

In the paper, I propose an extended version of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The extended version of CMT consists of a number of distinctions relating to meaning, conceptual structure, memory, ontological level (or realm), and context. In discussing the relevant distinctions each of these categories involve, I also indicate how they are related...

A tanulmány arra a kérdésre igyekszik választ adni, hogyan tesszük világunkat és a nyelvet a magunk számára értelmezhetővé. A kérdést a kognitív nyelvészet szemszögéből válaszoljuk meg, amely szerint a világ és a nyelv értelmezésében és értelmezhetővé tételében a képi sémáknak elsődleges szerepük van. A képi sémák szerepét elsősorban a metaforákon...

In the paper I try to figure out what relationship obtains between force dynamics (as proposed by Talmy, 1988) and conceptual metaphor theory.

This paper is an attempt to propose a new view of emotion concepts in cognitive linguistics (for the "old" view, see Kövecses 1986, 1990, 2000). The new view builds on two changes to "standard" conceptual metaphor theory (CMT): the idea of conceptual metaphors as multilevel structures and the addition of a reformulated view of context to CMT (see K...

My goal in the paper is to examine a variety of visual experiences that appear to evoke visual metaphors. This is a range of experience types that extends from “sign-like” visual experiences to “non-sign-like” visual experiences. I propose that visual metaphors are evoked by paintings through winner’s podiums all the way to cityscapes and scenes in...

A major insight of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) is that it added a strong, empirically testable cognitive dimension to the study of metaphor that is capable of changing the way we think about metaphor not only in language, but also thought and action, and, ultimately, the way we do philosophy ( Lakoff & Johnson, 1980 , 1999 ). In the paper, I a...

This volume brings together twelve usage-based studies conducted by leading researchers in language and cognition that explore core issues of figurativeness from the Cognitive Linguistics perspective. The individual chapters reveal the central function of figurativeness in thought and its impact on language. Cognition relies on knowledge-structurin...

The phenomenon known as metaphor is an extremely complex mental event - we cannot capture its complexity if we tie ourselves to existing standard views on metaphor. This book offers fresh insight into metaphor, updating an established theory, conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), in the context of current cognitive linguistic theory, and clarifying man...

Metaphor and ideology in slang: the case of WOMAN and MAN Notre étude cherche à savoir si dans l'argot anglo-américain la conceptualisation de la FEMME est différente de celle de l'HOMME. La principale question qui se pose est la suivante : étant donné que l'argot est typiquement un langage d'hommes, la conceptualisation de la femme dans l'argot an...

Based on my multi-level view of conceptual metaphors (Kovecses 2017), I examine three issues in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT): First, I raise the issue of “deep” vs. “superficial” metaphors and their ontological status. It can be suggested that deep metaphors are those that are at the frame, domain or schema levels, while superficial ones are at...

This book describes methods, risks, and challenges involved in the construction of metaphor and metonymy digital repositories. The first part of this volume showcases established and new projects around the world in which metaphors and metonymies are harvested and classified. The second part provides a series of cognitive linguistic studies focused...

This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mech...

Metaphor allows us to think and talk about one thing in terms of another, ratcheting up our cognitive and expressive capacity. It gives us concrete terms for abstract phenomena, for example, ideas become things we can grasp or let go of. Perceptual experience—characterised as physical and relatively concrete—should be an ideal source domain in meta...

In this article we are concerned with the issue of metaphor universals in poetry. By metaphor universals we mean any (universal or potentially universal) metaphor-related phenomena. Metaphor universals are approached from a conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) perspective here. The majority of our examples are taken from American English, British Engli...

In the paper, I examine what English idioms related to money reveal about the conceptualization of money. Most money-related idioms in English are based on metaphor. Working with conceptual metaphor theory, I suggest that money idioms in English rely especially on two conceptual metaphors: MONEY IS A MOVING SUBSTANCE / OBJECT / LIQUID and MONEY IS...

I discuss three large issues relating to media language. (1) How does conceptual metaphor theory affect the way we see the conceptual system that characterizes the main participants of communication in the media? (2) How do conceptual metaphors structure the language (and thought) used by the media? (3) Is the metaphorical mind of the participants...

The chapter reports on work concerned with the issue of how conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) functions as a link between culture and cognition. Three large areas are investigated to this effect. First, work on the interaction between conceptual metaphors, on the one hand, and folk and expert theories of emotion, on the other, is surveyed. Second, t...

This book explores the influence of culture and cognition on translation and communication and brings together revised versions of papers delivered at the First International TransLingua Conference, organized in 2015 by the Institute of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics and the Department of English at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszc...

Among emotions, surprise has been extensively studied in psychology. In linguistics, surprise, like other emotions, has mainly been studied through the syntactic patterns involving surprise lexemes. However, little has been done so far to correlate the reaction of surprise investigated in psychological approaches and the effects of surprise on lang...

This is a review of a book by Patrick Colm Hogan.

The issue I address in the paper is this: What is the nature of context in Cultural Linguistics? The particular cultural linguistic phenomenon I investigate here is that of the use of metaphor, especially the production (as opposed to the comprehension) of metaphor in discourse (see Kövecses 2015). In a way, this very question is controversial: Cul...

A large number of humorous linguistic expressions in English (and also in other languages) are characterized by such cognitive processes as metonymy, metaphor, and conceptual integration, or blending. However, these figurative devices are neither sufficient nor necessary for humorous effects. Following other researchers, I suggest that in order to...

I examine the metaphors associated with smell.

Mixing metaphors in speech, writing, and even gesture, is traditionally viewed as a sign of inconsistency in thought and language. Despite the prominence of mixed metaphors, there have been surprisingly few attempts to comprehensively explain why people mix their metaphors so frequently and in the particular ways they do. This volume brings togethe...

In this paper, I examine the concept of surprise from a cognitive linguistic perspective. As previous studies indicate, surprise is a not-quite-prototypical emotion category. My focus will be on the structure and content of surprise as an emotion category, as this can be revealed on the basis of the language speakers of English use to talk about it...

My goal in the paper is to examine the signifi cance of a root morpheme in language and cognition in three interconnected areas; in the creation of words; in meaning making; and in conceptual structure. I use the Hungarian root es- , meaning ‘fall’, for demonstration – a root that occurs in over 100 Hungarian words. First, I examine the issue of th...

The book argues that the use of metaphors does not depend simply on preestablished metaphorical structures in the conceptual system. Instead, metaphors arise as a result of contextual influences. The mind is in constant interaction with the situational, discourse, conceptual-cognitive, and bodily contexts.

English, Spanish, Turkish, and Hungarian from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Our database includes large corpora and standard newspapers and magazines in the four languages for the past 10 years. First, we intend to uncover the most common conceptual metaphors in the respective languages. Second, we discuss the main systematic similarities and...

This chapter studies metaphors for anger in four languages, American English, Spanish, Turkish, and Hungarian from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Our database includes large corpora and standard newspapers and magazines in the four languages for the past 10 years. First, we intend to uncover the most common conceptual metaphors in the respecti...

I propose in this chapter that metaphor is an emergent phenomenon. Continuing some work on metaphor in the cognitive linguistic tradition and kindred approaches, I attempt to describe how and why metaphor emerges. As regards these issues, I suggest that metaphors emerge as a result of speakers perceiving some similarity in experience and the corres...

What is the appropriate conceptual structure involved in conceptual metaphors? Various authors offer a large number of terms to discuss the issue. While domain is the most common term, many others are also used, including frame, image schema, cognitive model, idealized cognitive model, scene, schema, scenario, etc. The problem is compounded by the...

The issue of context has been, in the main, neglected in cognitive linguistic and much other work on how conceptual systems change and vary. In most recent work on conceptual systems, the issues of embodied cognition and the universal nature of cognitive operations have been emphasized. By contrast, my major goal in this paper is to attempt to char...