Zoltán Kövecses
Eötvös Loránd University
Budapest
kovecses.zoltan@btk.elte.hu

Cultures emerge when prehistoric humans begin to create imagined realities (i.e., realities that
do not exist objectively) (Harari, 2015). These imagined realities are constituted by abstract
concepts. As we know from conceptual metaphor theory (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980;
Kövecses, 2010), abstract concepts arise from more concrete concepts via figurative ways of
conceptualization, such as metonymy, metaphor, and blending. With the help of the concrete
concepts that denote physical reality, people around the world create a large variety of
imagined realities, that is, cultures. The development of these cultures through time can be
called history.
How did metaphor play a role in the emergence of cultures? I use “extended conceptual
metaphor theory” (Extended CMT) (see Kövecses, 2015, 2020) to address this issue. There
are a number of more specific questions that need to be answered in such an undertaking.
These include: Do we have any evidence for the existence of metaphorical thinking by early
humans between roughly 30000 and 100000 years ago? What was the “entry level” of
metaphorical thinking as regards the participating conceptual structures – image schemas,
frames or something else? What kind of metaphors were used initially – correlation or
resemblance metaphors, or both? Did the emerging cultures share any forms of conceptual
metaphors? How can we account for the apparent diversity of metaphorical thinking in later
periods, but also maybe in the initial period of the emergence of metaphorical
conceptualization?
Unfortunately, in the talk, most of these questions will remain unanswered in a definitive way.
I raise them and provide some framework for their discussion in order to start dealing with
such issues in a principled way.

References:
Harari, Yuval N. 2015. Sapiens. A brief history of humankind. London: Vintage.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2010. Metaphor. A practical introduction. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2015. Where metaphors come from. Reconsidering context in metaphor.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2020. Extended conceptual metaphor theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
State University of Applied Sciences in Konin

barbara.lewandowska.tomaszczyk@gmail.com

The paper focuses on the phenomena of cultural foundations of the concepts of foot and shoes
and related forms in their onomasiological and semasiological perspectives. Physicality of the
human body and the processes of its conceptual embodiment as well as connected
emotionality on the one hand together with the contexts of cultural practices and artefacts
involving these forms on the other will be discussed and elaborated on in social cognitive
contexts. Lexical forms concerning human body referring to legs and feet on the one hand as
well as to shoeware on the other, are treated as broad meaning-building stimulators and
presented to support the constructing of culturally rich cognitive Image Schema
representations and complex cultural conceptualizations. They emerge as a consequence of
the dynamic usage models of these lexical forms in terms of accompanying emotion clusters,
related to each of the discussed concepts and relevant cultural scenarios. The framework
adopted for the analysis presents examples of multimodal types. Their analysis is carried out
in terms of interdisciplinary methodological instruments such as Cognitive Linguistic
construal and conceptualizations, relevant cultural schemas incorporating rich figurative
constructions, social and historical models as well as emotion studies and corpus linguistic
tools, in particular usage frequency counts and collocational profiles. It is shown how the
relevant cultural conceptualizations of the objects discussed come into existence as a result of
interactions between members of a cultural group and are used in language and vision as
forms of particular prominence of the socio-cultural type.

Helen Meng
Chinese University of Hong Kong
cuhk2.hmmeng@gmail.com

Spoken language offers a remarkably rich medium for human-human communication. It encodes
information through acoustics, phonetics and linguistics about what we mean, who we are, how
we feel, and the context surrounding us. As Hong Kong is situated at the confluence of western
and Asian cultures, we observe a preponderance of Chinese-accented English speech, as well as
Chinese-English code-switched speech. This talk presents our group’s research in the
development of spoken language technologies for recognition of Chinese-accented English
speech, aimed at achieving mispronunciation detection and diagnoses to support computer-aided
pronunciation training for raising English language proficiency. We will also present our work
in text-to-speech synthesis of Chinese-English code-switched speech using monolingual corpora
from different speakers, where the modeling needs to disentangle language and speaker
characteristics in the corpora.

Biography:
Helen Meng is Patrick Huen Wing Ming Professor of Systems Engineering and Engineering
Management at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her research interests include
speech and language technologies to support multilingual and multimodal human-computer
interactions, eLearning and assistive technologies, as well as big data decision analytics using
AI. She leads the interdisciplinary research team that received the first Theme-based Research
Scheme Project in Artificial Intelligence in 2019 from the HKSAR Government’s Research
Grants Council. She is Chair of the Curriculum Development in the CUHK-JC AI4Future
Project, which has developed the courseware for pre-tertiary AI education being taught in a
growing number of participating secondary schools across Hong Kong.
Helen received all her degrees from MIT. She is the Founding Director of the CUHK
Ministry of Education (MoE)-Microsoft Key Laboratory for Human-Centric Computing and
Interface Technologies (since 2005), Tsinghua-CUHK Joint Research Center for Media
Sciences, Technologies and Systems (since 2006), and Stanley Ho Big Data Decision Analytics
Research Center (since 2013). Previously, she has served as CUHK Faculty of Engineering’s
Associate Dean (Research), Chairman of the Department of Systems Engineering and
Engineering Management, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and
Language Processing, Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors,

ISCA Board Member and presently member of the IEEE SPS Awards Board and ISCA
International Advisory Council. She was elected APSIPA’s inaugural Distinguished Lecturer
2012-2013 and ISCA Distinguished Lecturer 2015-2016. Her awards include the Ministry of
Education Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award 2009, Microsoft
Research Outstanding Collaborator Award 2016 (1 in 32 worldwide), IBM Faculty Award 2016,
HKPWE Outstanding Women Professionals and Entrepreneurs Award 2017 (1 in 20 since 1999),
Hong Kong ICT Silver Award 2018 in Smart Inclusion, 2019 IEEE SPS Leo L. Beranek
Meritorious Service Award and various best paper awards.
Helen has served in a number of government appointments, which include memberships
in the Steering Committee of Hong Kong’s Electronic Health Record Sharing, Social Welfare
Department’s Joint Committee on Information Technology for the Social Welfare Sector and
Advisory Committee on financing social welfare services. She is also a member of the AI4SDGs
AI for Children Working Group. Helen is a Fellow of IEEE, ISCA, HKIE and HKCS.

Csaba Pléh

Department of Cognitive Science
Central European University
Budapest
pleh.csaba@gmail.com

I shall start off from three approaches to the thought/culture relations. One is unconstrained
universalism, the other is the assumption of qualitative differences between types of thoughts
that would by some interpretations correspond to patterns of culture and finally, the third
approach allows a multiplicity of styles of thought that can be combined in flexible ways.
As empirical illustration of these assumptions I shall first characterize some proposals for
postulating a perceptual, cultural and contextual analyticity/holism strategy difference that is
many times related to assume East/West cultural differences. Then I shall move on to what
the issue of linguistic relativity taught us about dangers of relating typological differences,
and even differences in processing regarding assumed overall geographic/cultural differences.
One example is the issue of spatial orientation and language use. Strong claims were made by
Levison hat language determines the use of egocentric versus allocentric ori8entation.
Hungarian, with its strongly articulated egocentric spatial marking system in noun phrases is a
clear candidate for the use of egocentric frames of reference. Our data, however, collected by
Rozália Ivády and Gabriella Felhősi challenge this view. I shall argue that language, way of
life, age and education all contribute to the peculiar interface of spatial orientation and
language.
I shall argue on the basis of our own researches and from studies of other groups for a
constrained relativity view, and for a proposal that the processing differences are not
absolutes.

Hans-Georg Wolf
The University of Potsdam
hgwolf@uni-potsdam.de

The success of Cultural Linguistics as a far-reaching research paradigm has been due, to a
vast extent, to Sharifian’s (e.g., 2003, 2011, 2015, 2017a/b) integration of previous theoretical
concepts, methods, and terminologies into a unified theoretical approach. However, this
process of integration, to my mind, has not been completed. In fact, in a couple of
publications (Wolf, Finzel, and Latic fc.; Kühmstedt and Wolf fc.), I was about to enter into a
terminological debate with Farzad Sharifian, when he suddenly departed. In this paper, I
would like to take up and systematize this debate. Primarily, as regards theory, I will focus on
the relation of Cultural Linguistics to Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and as regards terminology
(and methodology), on the central concept of ‘cultural conceptualization.’ By doing so, I hope
to solidify the paradigm of Cultural Linguistics even more and to provide further
terminological refinements.