CCL 5

27-28 April 2027

The Institute of English Studies at the University of Rzeszów has the pleasure of announcing the fifth edition of the conference Culture and Cognition in Language: CCL 5. The conference is aimed at viewing language as both a cultural and a cognitive phenomenon. This year's leading theme is:

Dynamic Aspects of Meaning Construction

Meaning is not a static property of words or sentences but an emergent, context‑sensitive outcome of cognitive and communicative processes. Historical semantics provides an essential backdrop for understanding how meaning emerges and transforms across time, and how changes in meaning correlate with shifts in conceptual organization and communicative practice. Rather than treating semantic change as a sequence of isolated shifts, contemporary approaches emphasize its dynamic, cognitively motivated character [1].

Yet diachronic and synchronic variation are inextricably connected, for processes such as metaphorization, metonymization, broadening, narrowing, and shifts in evaluative meaning can be seen as long‑term manifestations of the same conceptual mechanisms that shape meaning in everyday discourse, while lexical variation may be regarded as the result of an interaction between semasiological and onomasiological changes [2].

Dynamic approaches to meaning construction foreground the idea that “meaning construction is grounded in the principles of cognitive modeling” [3], highlighting the role of conceptual integration, frame shifting, perspective taking, metaphor, metonymy, and other cognitive mechanisms in shaping how speakers produce and interpret meaning in real time.

Building on the rich traditions of Cognitive Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and Discourse Analysis, this year's edition invites contributions that investigate the dynamic, situated, and often unpredictable nature of meaning‑making across a range of linguistic and multimodal contexts.

With the above in mind, we particularly welcome submissions addressing topics such as:

• Diachronic aspects of meaning
• The interplay between synchrony and diachrony
• Conceptual integration and blending
• Metaphor and metonymy in discourse
• Construction Grammar and constructional meaning
• Frame semantics and frame-shifting
• Perspective, subjectivity, and viewpoint
• Embodiment and situated meaning
• Dynamic meaning in multimodal communication
• Meaning construction in interaction and conversation
• Creative language use: humour, irony, and non-literal meaning
• Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation in meaning construction
• Computational and corpus-based approaches to dynamic meaning

While we will especially appreciate presentations aligned with the theme of the conference and the proposed topics, we are open to papers on all topics discussing language from a cultural and cognitive perspective.

Research areas especially welcome

• Cognitive linguistics
• Cultural linguistics
• Semantics and pragmatics
• Sociolinguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Construction Grammar
• Discourse analysis
• Multimodality and semiotics
• Philosophy of language
• Rhetoric and argumentation
• Contact linguistics

[1] Kay, C., & Allan, K. (2015). English historical semantics. Edinburgh University Press.

[2] Geeraerts, D., Speelman, D., Heylen, K., Montes, M., De Pascale, S., Franco K., & Lang, M. (2024). Lexical variation and change. A distributional semantic approach. Oxford University Press.

[3] Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F. (2021). Ten lectures on cognitive modeling. Between grammar and language-based inferencing (Distinguished lectures in Cognitive Linguistics, vol. 25). Brill.

Call for Papers