CCL 4

28-29 April, 2025

The Department of English Studies at the University of Rzeszów has the pleasure of announcing the fourth edition of the conference Culture and Cognition in Language: CCL 4. The conference is aimed at viewing language as a both cultural and cognitive phenomenon. This year’s leading theme is:

Current approaches to discourse analysis

Intending to stay in touch with challenges and problems of the contemporary world, discourse analysis focuses on how language both shapes and is shaped by social, cultural and cognitive contexts. Thus, linguists involved in discourse studies have been constantly addressing current social issues, such as, the censorship of offensive metaphors [1], anti-immigrant attitudes among politicians [2], figurative conceptualisation of emotions accompanying death of a child [3] or metaphorical scenarios in conspiracy theories [4]. Given this, we would like to suggest submissions concerning the analysis of discourses on issues relevant to the contemporary society, e.g.

• Power and ideology
• Manipulation vs persuasion
• Misinformation: fake news and conspiracy theories
• Prejudice and stereotypes
• Inequality
• Crisis and conflict (social, inter- and intra-personal, etc.)
• Identity (social, national, gender, etc.)
• Relationships
• Health and illness
• Natural world

[1] Gibbs, R. (2023) Should offensive metaphors be censored? Metaphor and the Social World 14 (1): 154-162.

[2] Hart, C. and Winter, B. (2022) Gesture and legitimation in the anti-immigration discourse of Nigel Farage. Discourse & Society 33 (1): 34-55.

[3] Turner, S., Littlemore, J., Parr, E., Taylor, J. & Topping, A. (2023). ‘Lights in the darkness’, Part 2: characterising effective communication with healthcare practitioners following the death of a child. Mortality 28 (4): 627-644.

[4] Musolff, A. (2024) War metaphors and conspiracy theories. In Metaphor in Socio-Political Contexts: Current Crises, edited by M. Romano. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 159-176.