Political Language in Motion

Online workshop - Call for papers  

Political Language in Motion

Saturday 28 January, 2023

Workshop organizer: Dr. A. Vogiatzis

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of English

Email: polmo365@gmail.com, www.enl.auth.gr/tclr

With the world experiencing events and changes of historical proportions, such as the pandemic, the attack of Russia on Ukraine, the climate crisis, the transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy, political leaders, policy makers, and stakeholders have had to introduce, promote, - or even deny - changes and events that alter the status quo and affect the public directly or indirectly. 

In physical space, motion entails constant change and evolution; when political language is in motion it is used dynamically in order to accommodate and account for policy change. Political Language in Motion aims to actively address the issue of the way politicians, policy makers, and stakeholders make use of conceptual tools and draw from central islands of the Cognitive Linguistics archipelago (cognitive grammar, conceptual metaphor, image schema, metonymy, frame semantics, construction grammar,...)(Geeraerts, 2006: 2) in political discourse (Charteris-Black, 2005; Lakoff, 2004; Musolff et al., 2022; Perrez et al., 2019; Vogiatzis, 2022), synchronically or diachronically, in order to address events/changes that are taking place or that will take place in the future. 

The workshop welcomes proposals, in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, on both verbal and multimodal communication that examine the use of language and modalities in different contexts such as: social media, crisis communication, strategic communication, disinformation, print and/or digital press, parliamentary addresses, corporate communication, NGOs, to name but a few.

All researchers will be allocated 15 minutes for presentation, plus 5 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts should be up to 250 words and must be sent to (Google forms) https://forms.gle/KbvY88ojiHvjxu9U9  by November 30th, 2022.

Keynote speakers: 

Dr. Andreas Musolff, University of East Anglia

Dr. Veronika Koller, Lancaster University 

Dr. Anaïs Augé, University of Louvain, Institute of Political Sciences Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE)

The workshop will take place via Zoom. Fees: free   

References

Charteris-Black, J. 2005.  Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Geeraerts, D. 2006. A rough guide to cognitive linguistics. In Cognitive Linguistics: Basic readings. D. 

Geeraerts, R. Dirven, & J., R. Taylor, R., W Langacker (Eds). Berlin & New York: Mouton de 

Gruyter. 

Lakoff, G. 2004. Don’t think of an elephant. Vermont: Chelsea Green.

Musolff, A., Breeze, R., Kondo K., Vilar-Lluch, S (Eds). 2022. Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy. Blumsbury

Perrez, J., Reuchamps, M., Thibodeau, P., (Eds). 2019. Variation in Political Metaphor, John Benjamins publishing company.

Vogiatzis, A. 2022. Valenced metaphors in strategic communication: the case of the Greek economic crisis. International Journal of Strategic Communication.