Marta Degani & Alexander Onysko (University of Klagenfurt)

Situated at the nexus of conceptual metaphors and cultural linguistics, our talk will focus on the repertoire of Aoteaora English in the context of New Zealand Englishes. The notion of Aotearoa English captures the expression of Māori cultural knowledge through English and through Maori elements integrated in English, as typically, but not exclusively, spoken by Māori New Zealanders who are bilingual and bicultural in Aotearoa New Zealand’s indigenous language and English. Among research in cultural linguistics, the use of metaphors has been shown to be a prominent component of cultural conceptualizations. Based on evidence taken from the New Zealand Stories corpus, we will critically discuss an approach of metaphor analysis and exemplify figurative conceptualizations in the data.

Our talk will start off with the scholarly controvery over Māori English, proposing the perspective of Aotearoa English as an additonal dimension. This will be followed by an introduction to the New Zealand Stories Corpus, its background and current stage of production. First results on topic choice as well as figurative and metaphorical conceptualizations will shed some light on the relevance of considering conceptual metaphors in the analysis of prompted narrations that make up the corpus data.