In this shorter seminar (30 minutes, 15 minutes discussion), Dr. Xing Li will give examples of "metaphor clusters" for LIFE metaphors in language and other semiotic systems, and address the potentials of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model to help explain the phenomenon. The seminar will be only on zoom: welcome in from 16:00 for introductions, before the talk starts.

Metaphors are unevenly distributed in languages and tend to occur together in textual or discourse adjacency as "metaphor clusters" (e.g. Low 1997; Cameron 2013). By appealing to the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM), analyzing verbal and non-verbal metaphors identified from a variety of sources including self-constructed linguistic corpus, LIFE metaphors transcribed from talk shows and internet memes collected from social media, this talk will explore how LIFE metaphors cluster in language and other semiotic systems, where do metaphor clusters come from, and how do they make sense. It examines the motivation of metaphor clusters from the three levels of MSM: Embodied, Sedimented, and Situated, and tries to elaborate an integrated sign-mediated meaning-construction process accounting for the clustering of metaphors.