The EMMA team will travel the next week to Amsterdam. As part of this visit, Paula Perez Sobrino will give a talk on metaphors and music on Tuesday 9 as part of the Metaphor Lab research meeting series entitled “Metaphors music live by: Metaphors to talk about music, metaphors to reason about music” (abstract below).

The rest of the EMMA team, Jeannette Littlemore and David Houghton, will join the Amsterdam Metaphor Lab on Thursday 11 February to discuss the specifics of future synergies between the two research groups.

The icing on the cake comes at the end of the week with Gerard's Steen inaugural lecture on Friday 12 February "Life is life. Changing perspectives in linguistics" .

We are very much looking forward to this week of metaphor and catching up with dear friends!

How do we make sense of such an abstract idea as musical motion? Even though it seems pretty natural to talk about “ascending notes” or “progressing harmonies, it still remains largely unresolved how do we infer motion from a musical work. In this presentation I take up Johnson and Larson’s (2003) point that the way we talk about music is essentially metaphorical as it is virtually impossible to structure musical motion without evoking the notion of physical motion (e.g. “The violins enter in measure 5”).

I will first discuss the way we talk about music. Based on an analysis of texts taken from newspaper concert reviews and academic music analyses, it will be shown that metaphors for music operate on at least two levels. Then I will shift the focus to the analysis of musical case studies. Metonymy, metaphor, hyperbole, paradox, and irony, are put in comparison and contrast in order to highlight the dynamicity and flexibility of conceptual mechanisms to account for meaning construction in multimodal contexts. While all these operations consist in putting in correspondence two entities, there are observable differences that allow us to draw distinct boundaries among them.