Jocelyn Wins First and Second

We are pleased to celebrate Jocelyn McKnight’s success at the Meetings of the Minds conference, where she received awards in both the poster and oral presentation categories for undergraduate students. Jocelyn’s work is notably interdisciplinary, bringing together ideas from Linguistics, Digital Humanities, and Indigenous Studies.

Jocelyn tied for first place in the poster competition for her honour’s thesis project, supervised by Dr. Conor Snoek in the Department of Indigenous Studies. Her research explores Tok Pisin, a lingua franca and mixed English and Indigenous language. Using a cognitive linguistic framework, she examines war and violence vocabulary in Tok Pisin and argues that its polysemous extensions can be understood through metaphor and metonymy.

In addition, Jocelyn placed second in the undergraduate oral presentation competition for a presentation on conceptual metaphor theory for love in Taylor Swift songs. This project originated as a paper for Dr. Snoek’s Language, Culture, and Cognition course in Fall 2025.

Abstract: Poster

'Let's Fight the Drums Because the Moon Is Fighting Me':

Polysemic Extensions of War and Violence in a Corpus of Tok Pisin

Catalyzed by an early history of forced displacement of Melanesian people, Tok Pisin has flourished into a stable language of mixed origins in Papua New Guinea. This paper presents a semantic analysis of Tok Pisin vocabulary associated with war and violence, while focusing on how these lexemes have undergone polysemic meaning extensions. The study is conducted on the Slone Corpus (Slone 2001), comprised of 873,347 tokens, containing Tok Pisin folktales from 1972–1997 in WantokNiuspepa and compared with dictionary data from the Mihalic dictionary (1971).

1. Ol i paitim han .pl pm hit-tr hands‘They clap their hands.’

2. Em paitim het bilong em.3sg hit-tr head poss 3sg‘He struck his head.’

The methodology combines three approaches. The first is etymological tracing for languages of mixed origin; this is adopted from Mühlhäusler (1984) to reconstruct the diachronic development of lexemes, and accounts for phonological, semantic, and structural blending. The second approach is semantic analysis grounded in Cognitive Linguistics to classify changes and identify how polysemic extensions emerge through conceptual associations; specifically, this paper examines metonymy (Ruiz de Mendoza 2000) e.g., striking action for rhythmic activity as seen in example (1) and (3), and metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) e.g., argument is war as seen in example (4). The third approach is corpus linguistics, which is used for textual processing.

3. Ol manmeri ol i paitim kundu.pl people pl hit-tr drum‘The people beat the drum.’

4. Bikpela   kukurai  i   bin   paitim  toktok.big meeting pm pst fight-tr talk‘The big meeting argued.’

Ultimately, this paper contributes to etymological studies for contact languages and cognitive semantics by modelling how lexical meaning develops, stabilizes and grows within a mixed language. Learn more at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19102360.

Abstract: Oral Presentation

Understanding the Death of Love:

Conceptual Metaphors in Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology

This paper presents a cognitive linguistics study on the conceptual metaphors present in Taylor Swift’s 11^th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology (TTPDTA). This album is the extended version of The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) and contains 15 tracks in addition to the original release. For this study, 26 of the 31 songs from TTPDTA have been taken as a corpus to analyse the conceptual metaphors for romantic love used across the album. Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) is the primary qualitative methodology used, as it has been successful in previous studies of conceptual metaphor analysis for songs. This method consists of initial close reading, lexical unit identification, and contextual vs. basic meanings identification. Building off Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, this paper identifies key structural metaphors for love and relationships. The results suggest love is predominantly constructed through seven main metaphors (e.g., love is pain, love is prison, love is religion, love is a journey, love is a living organism, love is performance, love is game). This indicates that there is a small subset of recurring metaphors, all with stable entailments, that structure the way love and relationships are talked about and understood in this album, meaning they function as an album-level framing device. This paper contributes to the study of conceptual metaphors in music and the growing body of literature on metaphorical analysis in Taylor Swift songs, while laying the basis for future diachronic comparison of metaphors across Swift’s discography. Learn more at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19152651.