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Professor Elena Semino

Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art

Degree: BA (Genoa), MA (Lancaster), PhD (Lancaster)

Associated research centres and groups: Pragmatics and Stylistics Research Group (PaSTY)

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Current Teaching

LING 210: Stylistics

LING 450: Stylistics

I teach Stylistics on the MA in English Language by Distance and the PhD in Applied Linguistics by Thesis and Coursework.

Research Interests

My research interests are in stylistics, corpus linguistics, and metaphor theory and analysis.

I have been involved in two corpus-based projects on speech, writing and thought presentation in written and oral narratives, with funding from the British Academy and the AHRB (with Mick Short and Tony McEnery). My work in literary stylistics focuses primarily on poetry and prose fiction, and has a cognitive linguistic orientation. My early work was concerned with poetic text worlds, and I retain an interest in this area. I also have a long-standing interest in 'mind style' - how distinctive fictional minds are linguistically constructed in novels and short stories.

I have worked on metaphor both in literary texts and in a range of non-literary text-types, including political speeches, newspaper language, and health communication. In 1999, I conducted a corpus-based study of the use of metaphor in relation to the single European currency in British and Italian newspapers (funded by the British Academy). In 2005, I led a corpus-based project on the metaphorical construction of speaking, writing and thinking in English (also funded by the British Academy). I was part of an international group of metaphor scholars who developed a methodology for the identification of metaphorical expressions in naturally-occurring language (see Pragglejaz Project ). My current work on metaphor includes: (a) a project that exploits a semantic annotation tool for the study of metaphorical patterns in large data sets (with Veronika Koller, Andrew Hardie and Paul Rayson), (b) research on metaphor in health-related communication, especially metaphors for chronic pain, (c) research on the implications of simulation-based theories of comprehension for the study of metaphor in language, and (d) collaborative research on variation in metaphor use across different genres and registers (with Alice Deignan and Jeannette Littlemore).

I am co-organising (with Veronika Koller) the 9th Conference of the Researching and Applying Metaphor Association (RaAM): 4-7 July 2012. See here.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I currently supervise eight PhD students, working on a variety of projects in stylistics, metaphor studies, and discourse analysis. I am interested in supervising students in the following areas:

• Cognitive stylistics: integration of linguistic analysis with theories of cognition (e.g. Schema theory, Blending theory) in order to study literary texts; the linguistic construction of fictional text worlds and fictional minds.
• Corpus stylistics: application of corpus methods to the study of literary texts.
• Metaphor studies: metaphor in literature, politics, science, health communication; integration of Cognitive metaphor theory with stylistics and discourse analysis; use of corpus-based methods in the study of metaphorical patterns in texts.

Career details

Before joining the Department, I taught Italian as a foreign language at Napier Polytechnic (Edinburgh) and Lancaster University.

I hold a Visiting Professorship in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Fuzhou University in China.

Publications

Books

Deignan, A., Littlemore, J. and Semino, E. (forthcoming 2013) Figurative Language, Genre and Register. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Semino, E. (2008) Metaphor in Discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Semino, E. and Short, M. (2004) Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, London : Routledge (now available in paperback)

Semino, E. and Culpeper, J. (eds) (2002) Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, Amsterdam : John Benjamins

Semino, E. (1997) Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts, London : Longman.

Journal Articles

Semino, E., Deignan, A. and Littlemore, J. (forthcoming) 'Metaphor and recontextualization', Metaphor and Symbol.

Semino, E. (2011) 'Deixis and fictional minds', Style, 45, 3, 418-40.

Semino, E. (2011) 'The adaptation of metaphors across genres', Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 9, 1, 130-52.

Semino, E. (2010) 'Descriptions of pain, metaphor and embodied simulation', Metaphor and Symbol, 25, 4, 205-26.

Semino, E. (2010) 'Unrealistic scenarios, metaphorical blends and rhetorical strategies across genres', English Text Construction, 3, 2, 250-74.

Koller, V., Hardie, A., Rayson, P., Semino, E. (2008) 'Using a semantic annotation tool for the analysis of metaphor in discourse', Metaphorik.de, 15, http://www.metaphorik.de/15/koller.pdf

Semino, E. (2007) 'Mind style 25 years on', Style, 41, 2, 153-203

Pragglejaz Group (2007). 'MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in discourse', Metaphor and Symbol, 22, 1, 1-39

Semino, E. (2006) 'Blending and characters' mental functioning in Virginia Woolf's Lappin and Lapinova', Language and Literature , 15, 1, 55-72

Semino, E. (2005) 'The metaphorical construction of complex domains: the case of speech activity in English', Metaphor and Symbol, 20,1 35-70

Semino, E. (2004) 'Representing characters' speech and thought in narrative fiction: A Study of England, England by Julian Barnes', Style , 38, 4, 428-451

Semino, E., Heywood, J. and Short, M. (2004) 'Methodological problems in the analysis of metaphor in a corpus of conversations about cancer', Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 7, 1271-1294

Short, M., Semino, E. and Wynne, M. (2002) 'Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse presentation using a corpus approach', Language and Literature, 11, 4, 325-55

Semino, E. (2002) 'A sturdy baby or a derailing train? Metaphorical representations of the euro in British and Italian newspapers', Text , 22, 1, 107-39

Semino, E. (2002) 'Stylistics and linguistic variation in poetry', Journal of English Linguistics, 30, 1, 28-50

Heywood, J., Semino, E. and Short, M. (2002) 'Linguistic metaphor identification in two extracts from novels', Language and Literature, 11, 1, 35-54

Culpeper, J. and Semino, E. (2000) 'Constructing witches and spells: Speech acts and activity types in Early Modern England', Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 1, 1, 97-116

Semino, E., Short, and Wynne, M. (1999) 'Hypothetical words and thoughts in contemporary British narratives', Narrative , 7, 3, 307-334

Semino, E., Short, M. and Culpeper, J. (1997) 'Using a corpus to test a model of speech and thought presentation', Poetics , 25, 17-43

Semino, E. (1996) 'Possible Worlds in Poetry', Journal of Literary Semantics, 25, 3, 189-224

Semino, E. and Swindlehurst (1996) 'Metaphor and Mind Style in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', Style , 30, 1, 143-166

Semino, E. and Masci, M. (1996) 'Politics is football: metaphor in the discourse of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy', Discourse and Society, 7, 2, 243-269

Semino, E. (1995) 'Schema Theory and the Analysis of Text Worlds in Poetry', Language and Literature, 4, 2, 79-108

Book chapters

Semino, E. (forthcoming) 'Language, mind and autism in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'. In Fludernik, M. and Jacob, D. (eds) Linguistics and Literary Studies. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Semino, E. (2011) 'Metaphor, creativity, and the experience of pain across genres'. In Swann, J., Pope, R. and Carter, R. (eds) Creativity in Language andLiterature: The State of the Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 83-102.

Deignan, A. and Semino, E. (2010) 'Corpus techniques for metaphor analysis'. In Cameron. L. and Maslen, R. (ed.) Metaphor Analysis: A Guide for Researchers in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities. London: Equinox, 161-79.

Semino, E. (2009) 'The language of newspapers'. In Culpeper, J., Katamba, F., Kerswill, P., Wodak, R. and McEnery, T. (eds) English Language: Description, Variation and Contexts. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 439-53.

Koller, V. and Semino, E. (2009). 'Metaphor, politics and gender: A case study from Germany'. In: Ahrens, K. (ed.) Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 9-35

Semino, E. and Koller, V. (2009). 'Metaphor, politics and gender: A case study from Italy'. In: Ahrens, K. (ed.) Politics, Gender and Conceptual Metaphors. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 36-61.

Semino, E. (2009) 'Text worlds'. In Brône, G. and Vandaele, J. (eds) Cognitive Poetics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 33-71.

Semino, E. and Steen, G. (2008) 'Metaphor in literature'. In Gibbs, R. W. Jr. (ed.) Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 232-46

Heywood, J. and Semino, E. (2007) 'Metaphors for speaking and writing in the British press'. In Esslin, A. and Johnson, S. (eds) Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies, Continuum.

Semino, E. (2006) 'A corpus-based study of metaphors for speech activity in British English'. In Gries, S.T. and Stefanowitsch, A. (eds) Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Conceptual Metaphors, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 35-60.

Semino, E. (2002) 'A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style in narrative fiction'. In Semino, E. and Culpeper, J. (eds.) Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, John Benjamins, 95-122

Short, M., Semino, E. and Culpeper, J. (2000) 'Language and Context: Jane Gardam's Bilgewater'. In Bex, T., Burke, M. and Stockwell, P. (eds.) Contextualized Stylistics, Amsterdam : Rodopi, 131-52

Short, M., Wynne, M. and Semino, E. (1999) 'Reading Reports: Discourse Presentation in a Corpus of Narratives, with Special Reference to News Reports'. In Diller, H-J. and Stratmann, E.O-J. (eds.) English Via Various Media, Heidelberg : Winter, 39-65

Wynne, M., Short, M. and Semino, E. (1998) 'A Corpus-based Investigation of Speech, Thought and Writing Presentation in English Narrative Texts'. In Renouf, A., (ed.) Explorations in Corpus Linguistics , Amsterdam: Rodopi, 233-47

Short, M., Semino, E. and Culpeper, J. (1996) 'Using a corpus for stylistics research: speech and thought presentation'. In Thomas, J. and Short, M. (eds.) Using Corpora in Language Research, London: Longman, 110-131

Semino, E. (1995) 'Deixis and the dynamics of poetic voice'. In Green, K. (ed.) New Essays in Deixis, Amsterdam : Rodopi, 145-160

Semino, E. and Culpeper, J. (1995) 'Stylistics'. In Blommaert, J., Ostman, J.O. and Verschueren, J. (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 513-520

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Elena Semino has 63 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

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Associated Keywords: Cognitive linguistics, Corpus stylistics, Literary stylistics, Metaphor, Non-literary stylistics, Stylistics

 

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