Hello!  Just a quick note to let you know that our trip to New York was a great success! The International Linguistics Association conference was smaller than I expected – about 100 attendees – but had linguistics professors from all over the world: Lithuania, Serbia, Austria, England, etc.  I was the only community college instructor.

The organizers and attendees were very nice and supportive of all the presenters.  It was held at Kingsborough Community College situated right on the ocean/Jamaica Bay in southeastern Brooklyn.  The college administrators were very supportive of the conference and provided a delicious lunch on Saturday prepared by their own culinary arts students.

Everyone seemed to like my presentation. They were impressed with my research, liked the way I categorized all the metaphors and were very supportive of me in trying to get the book published. I went beyond merely listing the categories of metaphors and talked about how important metaphors can be to the American political process.  The conference was very inspirational! It made me think of the importance of this kind of research for native speakers of English but also naturalized citizens still learning English who want to be more involved in local or national politics. I will add a new post soon about some of these issues.

As always, thanks for reading!