Annotation
This course introduces students to recent research on metaphor (and, secondarily, metonymy) as a conceptual and linguistic structure. The scope of the readings is purposefully broad. Much of the theoretical reading will necessarily be done in English, although in the course we will make every effort to apply the theoretical framework to an examination of the role of metaphor in Slavic languages and literatures. While much work has been done on Slavic lexical semantics from a cognitive perspective (eg, semantics of prefixation), application of a conceptual theory of metaphor to the structure of Slavic languages, and especially to literary analysis, remains a relatively unexplored - but potentially quite rich - area of research.
The overarching goal of the course is to take concepts introduced in the lectures and reading and then apply them to the investigation of metaphor in Czech. Students will write a research paper in which they do just that. Students will be encouraged to make use of the National Corpus of Czech to supply the contextualized data for analysis in this project, and papers may be written in English or Czech.