Michał Szawerna - Böcker

The origins of this volume lie in the international conference Cognitive Linguistics in the Year 2012, convened by the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association. The proceedings of the conference revolved around three major thematic areas: metaphorical and metonymic underpinnings of meaning in language and beyond, prototypical and gradual phenomena pertaining to linguistic categorization across the lexicogrammatical continuum, and the need for advancing theoretical tools. These recurring themes are reflected in the three-part structure of this volume, with contributions from nearly two dozen researchers exploring a broad array of linguistic as well as non-linguistic data.

This volume has its origins in an international conference on emotions organized by the Polish Association for the Study of English and held at the University of Wrocaw in April 2015. In the course of the conference, it became clear that emotions are productively explored with relation to motion for the reason that emotion(s) and motion(s) constitute profoundly intertwined dimensions of physical and cultural embodiment reflected in language. The relationship between motion(s) and emotion(s) became the underlying theme of this volume, which comprises nineteen contributions presenting exploratory and applicative accounts of (e)motion(s) situated in topical research areas of linguistic theory, second language acquisition, and translation studies.

This book offers a cognitive-semiotic approach to metaphoricity of visual representations in static visual narratives referred to as comics. It implements this approach in an exploration of conventionalized visual signs depicting diegetic situations, motion events, sound events, and diverse psychological experiences in such narratives. With his focus on the intersection of comics studies, conceptual metaphor theory, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, the author analyzes a broad array of attested data retrieved from comics exemplifying various publication formats, generic conventions, and cultural traditions. His exploration situates the metaphoricity of the analyzed visual signs against the backdrop of their overall semiotic makeup and in relation to the metaphoricity of their linguistic counterparts.