Milena Podolsak
About me
I am a PhD candidate in Scandinavian languages and a lecturer in Swedish as a foreign language.
My main research interest is lexical semantics, with a particular focus on metaphor and metonymy. In my current doctoral project, I analyse motion and journey metaphors in contemporary Swedish political speeches.
I teach courses in grammar, text analysis, multimodality, and Swedish as a foreign language.
Research
Motion Metaphors in Swedish Political Speeches
PhD dissertation in DiVA:
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-242219
In my ongoing dissertation project, I analyse motion and journey metaphors in Swedish political speeches from 2009 to 2022. The overarching aim of the study is to explain how systemic, conceptual metaphors function in political rhetoric, how communicative goals shape conventional metaphorical expressions, and how metaphors help convey political messages
My analysis focuses on what I term discrepancies in the metaphorical projection from the source domain (concrete motion) to the target domain (political activity). Discrepanties are defined all the aspects of motion metaphors that cannot be explained by examining how we talk about concrete motion. To identify such discrepancies, a combination of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson 1980), Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner 2002), and Holistic Spatial Semantics (Zlatev et al. 2010) is used.
Keywords: conceptual metaphors, political discourse, motion conceptualization, conceptual integration, metaphorical meaning construction, connotation, semantic prosody, Swedish.
Referenser
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2002. The way we think. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Zlatev, Jordan, Johan Blomberg & Caroline David. 2010. “Translocation, Language and the Categorization of Experience.” Pp. 389–418 in Language, cognition and Space: The state of the art and new directions. Advances in Cognitive Linguistics, edited by V. Evans and P. Chilton. London: Equinox Publishing.
$presentationText