Visnja Cicin-Sain

My primary academic interests are metaphor and figuration in both their linguistic-discursive and conceptual-cognitive aspects. How do we conceptualize complex and multi-aspectual linguistic phenomena such as language contact, change and classification? What figurations do we commonly use in expressing evaluative stance to specific language phenomena (e.g. borrowings)? I address these and similar questions in my dissertation employing primarily a bottom-up, discourse analysis approach. Area specifically, I analyze discourses and language debates in the area of the former Yugoslavia. ​I examine the ways in which metaphors and figurations are deployed in discursive projects of creating and sustaining ideologies related to the successor languages established after the disintegration of Serbo-Croatian – Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, with a specific focus on the discursive employment of figurations in the delineation of language borders.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of my interests (discursive and cognitive approaches to language), I am committed to the idea of experimental verification of theoretical, cognitive linguistic models. A part of my dissertation consists of devising and conducting experimental tasks to inquire into the psychological reality of conceptual (mental) metaphors proposed in my research. I have tested the AN UNACCEPTABLE LINGUISTIC ELEMENT IS DIRTY conceptual link in the context of attitudes to foreign linguistic elements in Croatia. The experiment aims to demonstrate that attitudinal aspects of the “classical” linguistic purism, conceptualized/verbalized in terms of language dirtying, tainting, contamination, may be conceptually grounded in the concepts of dirtiness and contamination.

Academic interests

• Cognitive Linguistics
• Metaphor analysis
• Conceptual Metaphor Theory
• Discourse analysis
• Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian