Katedra Języków i Kultur Afryki     

Body Part Terms in Linguistic Usage

workshop: Body Part Terms in Linguistic Usage: A Comparative and Typological Perspective

venue: University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Tyszkiewiczów-Potockich Palace, Balowa Hall

time: December 8-9, 2017

program: click here

conference e-mail: conf.orient@uw.edu.pl

conference webpage: http://linguisticembodiment.uw.edu.pl/

The embodied character of language is supported by research in semantics and cultural studies, but also by empirical evidence coming from neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropology, biosemiotics, neurology, and other sciences. Body-related lexicon is highly polysemous and easily extends onto other domains in numerous figurative senses. Transfers of body part terms share a number of cross-linguistic tendencies in the domain of grammaticalization, emotions, reasoning and social interactions, and figurative senses of body part terms often coincide in numerous unrelated languages of the world. The bodily lexicon also constitutes a good source for extension of truly culture-specific, highly unpredictable senses and idiomatic expressions. 

The workshop aims at a close examination of body part terms from the comparative perspective of unrelated, geographically distant and culturally differentiated languages. It will contribute to research on linguistic embodiment, but also to investigation of more general issues, such as studies on metaphor and metonymy, polysemy and representation of a lexical category, regularity of semantic change and cognitive universals, as well as problems of language-culture connection. 

Invited Keynote Speakers

• Zygmunt Frajzyngier  (University of Colorado, USA)
• Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (University of Lodz, Poland)
• Helma Pasch (University of Cologne, Germany)
• Ning Yu (Pennsylvania State University, USA) ​

Organizing committee

• Iwona Kraska-Szlenk
• Izabela Will
• Ahmad Shehu