Title: Cognition meets computation: computational approaches to the diachronic evolution of the vocabulary of emotions
Date: 12/06/2019
Time: 12:00
Town: Pisa
Venue: ILC-CNR – Aula Seminari IBF SG 5
Description:
This seminar will explore some of the different ways Cognitive Linguistics in general (and Socio-historical Cognitive Linguistics in particular) can benefit from the development and use of such computational tools as multimodal corpora and data-bases.
The focus will be on the vocabulary for a variety of emotional experiences, as recorded in Anglo-Saxon (850-1150 A. D.) texts.
The approach to this vocabulary is based on the identification and analysis of historical processes of semantic change, with special attention to processes of metaphorization and metonymization.
Both metaphor and metonymy are considered here powerful mechanisms of semantic change.
Furthermore, metaphor and metonymy illustrate different degrees of figurativeness, from literal to metaphoric.
This semantic continuum is, in my view, a reflect of the folk psychologies generated and promoted within each culture and historical period.
Moreover, the figurative expressions developed by each emotional community open new windows into past beliefs, morals and, specially, imagination.
From a computational linguistic perspective, this ongoing research is benefitting from a series of tools developed in cooperation with ILC (Pisa).
To start with, in the two-year period 2015-2016, I created a cognitively annotated corpus of Anglo-Saxon texts and images.
Based on this corpus, during the year 2016 I built a data-base of Old English emotional expressions, that I will describe in the second part of this presentation.
Finally, thanks to a second research stay at ILC (Winter-Spring 2019), we have started to work on such things as the representation of etymology and lexical-semantic change in TEI and the potential development of future cognitively annotated tools (such as online glossaries).
Speaker: Javier E. Dìaz-Vera
He is a Full Professor in English Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM, Spain).
His research focuses on the study of conceptual metaphor and metonymy from a variationist perspective, including historical, sociolinguistic and dialectal approaches.
He has published a wide variety of papers and book chapters on the multimodal expression of emotions, cognition and sensorial perception in historical varieties of English, with special attention to Old English.
His recent research focuses on the comparison between linguistic and visual representations of emotions in Anglo-Saxon texts and visual narratives.
Promotional Material: Brochure