How does the concept of time, elusive and inconceivable as it may be, lend itself to verbal creativity? Is it possible to trace something like a “poetics of time”? This book embarks on this endeavor initiated by the assumption that verbal creativity can shed some new light on our understanding of time, challenging everyday linguistic patterns and manipulating mental representations in unforeseen ways. Drawing on empirical evidence from Modern Greek poetry, the book offers a unified account of time conceptualization along a continuum of various degrees of non-conventionality. It also shows, unlike what has been traditionally assumed in the literature, that creativity in the expression of time is not limited to metaphor but extends to other figurative tropes that are perhaps specific to poetry. Poetry thus transpires as an ideal testing frame for exploring temporal cognition and meaning construction alike.

In recent years, the study of the conceptualization of time has seen a considerable growth, providing a basis for exploring the cognitive foundation of metaphor. But if metaphorical representations of time are established in the cognitive system, how are they manipulated when humans are engaged in creative expression? This is the question that the present volume addresses, on the assumption that by interrogating creativity, new insights into our understanding of time may be gained. Our view of creativity, which informs the ten chapters that compose this volume, endorses not only the extraordinary instances found in poetry and the arts (cinema, music, graphic novels, etc.), but also its more ‘mundane’, everyday manifestations that appear in ordinary language use, political discourse, or TV news. Spanning across modalities (verbal, pictorial, auditory, and gestural), the exemplary expressions herein are intended to reflect the richness and diversity vis-à-vis the creativity of time representations while also pointing to the common underpinnings that motivate and constrain creativity.

The communicative act of drawing attention to metaphor is a relatively recent topic in metaphor studies and one that has remained contentious from a cognitive perspective. This book brings philologists of ancient languages together with metaphor experts from several modalities to interrogate whether ancient and modern texts and languages draw attention to figurative tropes in similar ways. In this way, the diachronic, multimodal and pluridisciplinary contributions to this volume critically review the theoretical frameworks underpinning metaphor marking and metaphor analysis from a completely new empirical basis.

This book explores the time that we (think we) experience and the concept of time in our beliefs, our knowledge, and our fears. We believe that time passes, we know that death is inevitable, we fear that we are going to be late. How do these human feelings and sensations of time relate to metaphysical time of tenseless reality? What do different languages tell us about the nature of human time? And what exactly is the flow of time? The chapters in this volume bring together insights from linguists and philosophers to examine questions about time on the micro-level of physical reality, as well as time in language and discourse on the macro-level of social reality. The unifying theme is that in order to understand human time we have to discover not only how we think and speak about time, but also what it is that makes us think and speak about it in a certain way.

Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics presents multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research papers describing new developments in the field of cognitive poetics. The articles examine the complex connections between cognition and poetics with special attention given to how people both create and interpret novel artistic works in a variety of expressive media, including literature, music, art, and multimodal artifacts. The authors have diverse disciplinary backgrounds, but all of them embrace theories and research findings from multiple perspectives, such as linguistics, psychology, literary studies, music, art, neuroscience, and media studies. Several authors explicitly discuss empirical and theoretical challenges in doing interdisciplinary work, which is often considered as essential to future progress in cognitive poetics. Scholars address many specific research questions in their articles, including most notably, the role of embodiment and simulation in human imagination, the importance of conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending processes in the creation and interpretation of literature, and the function of multiperspectivity in poetic and multimodal texts. Several new ideas are also advanced in the volume regarding the cognitive mechanisms responsible for artistic creations and understandings. The volume overall offers an expanded view of cognitive poetics research which situates the study of expressive minds within a broader range of personal, social, cultural and historical contexts. Among other leading researchers, many contributors are world-famous scholars of psychology, linguistics, and literature, including Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Zoltán Kövecses, and Reuven Tsur, whose defining papers also survey the roles and significance of conceptual mechanisms in literature.

The ongoing migration ‘crisis’ in European countries (2015 to date) has fostered different stances and practices within European nation-states, ranging from xenophobia to solidarity. In this context, two contradictory discourses seem to coexist: the national racist discourse and the humanitarian, antiracist one. This volume brings together studies investigating diverse semiotic strategies through which liquid racism emerges, which consists of ambiguities and contradictory interpretations due to the fact that racist views infiltrate discourse intended as antiracist. The volume includes critical and pragmatic analyses of texts coming from various sources, such as news articles, parliamentary discourse, political cartoons, video clips, advertising campaigns based on personal stories, and jokes. It is an outcome of the research project “TRACE: Tracing Racism in Anti-raCist discoursE: A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” (HFRI-FM17-42, HFRI 2019-2022, Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation).