0

About

ResearchMetaphor Lab Amsterdam is an internationally unique expertise center for Metaphor Studies in the capital of the Netherlands. It is a joint venture of the Network Institute at VU University Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC) at the University of Amsterdam, and is affiliated to the ABC, the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition centre.

Origin
Read all about the origin of the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam here.

Vision
We challenge present-day claims in the humanities and the cognitive and social sciences about the alleged powers of metaphor in unconscious cognition (for instance in ‘framing’, storytelling and argumentation, and persuasion and instruction) and seek possibilities for rehabilitating and modernizing more traditional approaches to metaphor, as in rhetoric, while indicating its potential for application to and intervention in everyday reality.

Mission
We stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration, innovation, and application in all areas of metaphor research inside and outside academic communities and focus on how metaphor cognition works in discourse processing.

Research
We conduct fundamental and applied research that deals with the exploitation of metaphor as a tool of expression, conceptualization and communication.

Objectives
We aim to contribute new insights into the role of metaphor and its use in all sorts of real world contexts, ranging from the first second of utterance comprehension to the extended temporal planes of public debates in the media as well as language acquisition and learning. We hope that this will lead to applied research turning these insights into tools for intervening in communicative practices of all sorts in order to examine and ideally improve their effectiveness.

Disciplinary interests
Linguistics and discourse studies, psycholinguistics and cognitive science, sociolinguistics and social science, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics.

Outreach
Metaphor Lab Amsterdam seeks to develop new products and services for the non-academic community, to improve self-awareness, monitoring, training and testing of metaphor use in design, management, communication, and interaction.
Initial contact can be arranged through exploratory appointments, invited talks, and workshops for mind-mapping.

organozaton.001