Humanitarinių mokslų institutas / Institute of Humanities

Prieš metus per Velykas pasaulį nustebino vieno ypatingo reiškinio, vykusio Prancūzijos bažnyčiose, statistiniai duomenys: Didįjį Šeštadienį buvo apkrikštyta apie 10 000 suaugusių žmonių (į šį skaičių neįtraukti vaikai, kurių tą dieną buvo pakrikštyta 7 000), kai metais anksčiau tokių buvo perpus mažiau, dar anksčiau – dar gerokai mažiau (2 000–3 000 kiekvienais metais).

The aim of the research is to identify and compare conceptual metaphors of skin and beauty in skincare advertisements in English and Lithuanian, find metaphorical similarities and differences, and determine the frequency of their use in advertisements for women’s skincare products. The article discusses the premises underlying the emergence of the theory of conceptual metaphors, and analyses the characteristics of metaphorical language in advertising discourse. It explains how advertisers often propose new and creative metaphors, and apply creative manipulations of conventional metaphors. This section also provides a more detailed overview of advertisements targeting women, their influence on the perception of beauty. It examines which standards of female beauty help marketers sell products and what women (unconsciously) associate with beauty, thereby falling into the advertisers’ traps. The empirical part zeroes in on the analysis of examples of advertisements featuring English and Lithuanian conceptual metaphors. Based on the systematic nature and thematic focus of linguistic elements, skincare advertisements were collected and compared, and four conceptual metaphors were identified within the domain of reference skin / skincare /skin beauty: SKIN IS LIVING BEING, SKINCARE IS A BATTLE, SKINCARE IS A JOURNEY, SKIN BEAUTY IS GLOW. The analysis of the collected examples suggests that conceptual metaphors are frequently used in both English and Lithuanian beauty advertisements for skincare products, accentuating certain features that advertisers wish to impart to the advertised products. Although English and Lithuanian belong to different language types (analytic and synthetic), the figurative meaning conveyed in skincare advertisements largely overlaps across the two languages. The frequency calculations of conceptual metaphors show that the most frequent ones in English skincare advertisements is SKINCARE IS WAR, while in Lithuanian ones it is SKIN IS A LIVING BEING.

Lexical innovation refers to the process of creating new lexical items, enabling languages to adapt to evolving sociocultural and material realities. The domains of business, economics, and finance are among the most productive ones of lexical innovation. The present research study lies at the intersection of lexical innovation, idiomaticity, and large language model (henceforth, LLM) research and investigates lexical productivity, semantic shift, and globalisation (Anglocentric changes) in business-related colour idioms by comparing human translation and annotation with the output of LLMs. The current experiment involves an initial study carried out for five languages: English (the pivotal one), Albanian (AL), Hebrew (HE), Hungarian (HU), Lithuanian (LT), and Standard European Portuguese (PT). The research results reveal that LLMs show high mutual agreement, but the agreement with humans is lower. The internal consistency of LLMs reflects shared Anglocentric metaphor encoding rather than convergence toward human idiomatic usage. It demonstrates that human expertise remains essential for highquality idiomatic translation, particularly for culture-specific expressions.

Potentially idiomatic expressions (PIEs) carry meanings inherently tied to the everyday experience of a given language community. As such, they constitute an interesting challenge for assessing the linguistic (and to some extent cultural) capabilities of NLP systems. In this paper, we present XMPIE, a parallel multilingual and multimodal dataset of potentially idiomatic expressions. The dataset, containing 34 languages and over ten thousand items, allows comparative analyses of idiomatic patterns among language-specific realisations and preferences in order to gather insights about shared cultural aspects. This parallel dataset allows evaluation of language model performance for a given PIE in different languages and whether idiomatic understanding in one language can be transferred to another. Moreover, the dataset supports the study of PIEs across textual and visual modalities, to measure to what extent PIE understanding in one modality transfers or implies in understanding in another modality (text vs. image). The data was created by language experts, with both textual and visual components crafted under multilingual guidelines, and each PIE is accompanied by five images representing a spectrum from idiomatic to literal meanings, including semantically related and random distractors. The result is a high-quality benchmark for evaluating multilingual and multimodal idiomatic language understanding.

This conference originates from the Post-digital Storytelling for Gender Equality (PSGENEQ) Research Project. It is organized as part of a project funded by the State Budget titled “Establishment of Centers of Excellence at Mykolas Romeris University,” which is implemented under the initiative “Centers of Excellence Initiative” initiated by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports of the Republic of Lithuania.