The project is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU
Programme: National Recovery and Resilience Plan
Project Leader: Kristina Štrkalj Despot, PhD
Contracting/Host Institution: Institute of the Croatian Language
Head of Institution: Željko Jozić, PhD
Project Title: Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Thought
Project Acronym: MetaCro
Scientific Field: Humanities
Scientific Area: Philology
Project Website: metacro.jezik.hr
Project Start Date:
1 January 2024
Project End Date:
1 January 2028
Research Team Members
- Kristina Štrkalj Despot, PhD – Project Leader
- Prof. Branimir Belaj, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Osijek
- Ivana Brač, PhD
- Prof. Mario Brdar, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Osijek
- Prof. Gordana Hržica, PhD – Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, Zagreb
- Andrea Ledić – Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Croatia
- Prof. Nikola Ljubešić, PhD – Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
- Ana Ostroški Anić, PhD – Institute of the Croatian Language
- Assoc. Prof. Benedikt Perak, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rijeka
- Prof. Anita Peti Stantić, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
- Assoc. Prof. Martina Sekulić Sović, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
- Prof. Mateusz Milan Stanojević, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
- Assoc. Prof. Mirjana Tonković, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb
- Assoc. Prof. Ana Werkmann Horvat, PhD – Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Osijek
- Lobel Filipić, MA
Project Summary
Within the project Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Thought, theoretical and empirical research will be conducted on conceptual metaphor, metonymy, semantic frames, image schemas, and cognitive primitives in the Croatian language, within the cognitive-linguistic theoretical framework.
The project consists of two main parts:
a) expanding and refining the repository of conceptual metaphors in Croatian (as a continuation of the MetaNet.HR project in theoretical and methodological terms, with certain methodological modifications and modernization; the theoretical basis of the project is the neural theory of language and thought, while the methods for populating the database are corpus analyses and manual annotation of corpus sentences);
b) theoretical and applied research on metaphor and metonymy in thought and language (this part of the project will focus on figurative language in grammar, discourse, etymology, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, language pathologies, forensics, and natural language processing; methods used will include corpus-based, experimental, machine-learning methods, as well as qualitative analyses).
The updated database, together with the developed, replicable, and extensively tested method for its expansion, has the potential to become a model for building similar repositories for other languages. A multilingual database would be an indispensable tool for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research into the fundamental mechanisms of thought and language, both in terms of universality and cultural specificity.
Project Objectives
The two main objectives of the project are:
- expanding and refining the repository of conceptual metaphors in Croatian,
- theoretical and applied research on metaphor and metonymy in thought and language.
Additional objectives are:
- creation of a Croatian corpus of metaphors and metonymies,
- creation and annotation of a corpus of threatening letters,
- creation and annotation of a corpus of children’s language,
- publications (at least eight scientific papers indexed in Scopus, of which at least two in Q1 journals; at least one monograph and one edited volume).