The present text, entitled Ten Lectures on Figurative Meaning-Making: The Role of Body and Context by Zoltán Kövecses, is a transcribed version of the lectures given by Professor Zoltán Kövecses in November 2010 as one of the three forum speakers for The 8th China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics.
The text is published, accompanied by its videodisc counterpart and Chinese guide, as one of the Eminent Linguists Lecture Series.
The China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics provides a forum for eminent international scholars to talk to Chinese audiences. It is a continuing program organized by nine prestigious universities in Beijing. The main organizing institution is Beihang University (BUAA); co-sponsors for CIFCL 8 include Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, and Beijing Forestry University. Professor Kövecses’s lecture series was mainly supported by the Beihang Grant for International Outstanding Scientists for 2010 (Project number: Z1057, Project organizer: Thomas Fuyin Li).
The transcription of the video, proofreading the text, writing the Chinese guide, and publication of the work in its present book form, have involved many people’s strenuous inputs. The initial drafts were done by the following postgraduate students from Beihang Univcersity: Chao Chen, Miaomiao Dou, Rong Han, Fan Tian, Dongfang Wang, Yue Wu, Na Yang, Zuan Zhang, Jingyuan Zhao, Xueqing Zhou. Then we editors did the word-by-word and line-by-line revision. To improve the readability of the text, we deleted some of the false starts, repetitions, fillers like now, so, you know, OK, and so on, again, of course, if you like, sort of, etc. Occasionally, the written version needs an additional word to be clear, a word that was not actually spoken in the lecture. We’ve added such words within single brackets […]. To make the written version readable, even without watching the film, we’ve added a few “stage instructions”, in italics also within single brackets: […]. The stage instruction describes what the speaker was doing, such as pointing at a slide, showing an object, etc. The speaker, professor Kövecses did the final word-by-word revision. The published version is the final version approved by the speaker.
The publication of this book is sponsored by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Program Funds of the Chinese Ministry of Education (Number: 09YJA740010).
Thomas Fuyin Li
Beihang University (BUAA)
Yan Ding
Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU)