Course Goals:
This graduate seminar focuses on examining if metaphor influences our perception of the world, and if it does, in what ways. A historical overview of philosophers and linguists attempts to analyze metaphor will first be undertaken by looking at work of Aristotle, Black, Richards, and Wittgenstein. Then more modern approaches will be discussed (Lakoff, Charteris-Black, Steen, Semino, and the Pragglejaz group).Focus will then turn to recent work in analyzing the use of metaphors in political language, and implications of such metaphor use in relation to public perception of a politician or political issue will be discussed. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to analyzed metaphorical language extracted from corpora. A final project based on corpora data will be presented orally in class and will also be written up as a final paper. Students will be required to present readings each week and critique each other’s work.