Winter Semester 2026/27
Monday 9:45-11:15, room 601
Teacher: Dr Joanna Woźniak,
This lecture explores idioms as linguistic, cognitive, affective and discursive phenomena. Students will be introduced to the place of idioms within phraseology, their semantic and structural properties, and their functions in communication. The course will also introduce key concepts from discourse studies, with particular attention to figurative language and metaphor as resources for construing and evaluating events, people and social reality. The cognitive perspective will draw on Langacker’s notion of construal, Kövecses’s Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory (ECMT), Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen’s Conventional Figurative Language Theory (CFLT), and Musolff’s theory of metaphor scenarios.
Theoretical discussion will be combined with the analysis of authentic political and media discourse. Students will examine how idioms contribute to conceptualization, evaluation and pragmatic meaning. Particular attention will also be paid to the affective dimension of idiomatic meaning, including emotional valence and arousal, and to the ways in which idioms can contribute to positive and negative evaluations in discourse.
Practical activities will include identifying and interpreting idioms in context, examining phraseological creativity and modification, and tracing how particular expressions are recontextualized, transformed and circulated across texts and public discourse. Students will also learn how idioms can be investigated using linguistic corpora and concordance data. This will provide a basis for discussing methodological challenges involved in phraseological research, including formal variation, discontinuous and modified forms, the distinction between literal and figurative uses, and the difficulties of determining what counts as an idiomatic occurrence in authentic language data.