News | Metaphor Lab Amsterdam

Metaphor Festival – submit your abstract

How to submit your abstract

All abstracts can now be submitted by EasyChair. Deadline for submission is 31 March. Information about acceptances will be emailed by 15 April to all scholars submitting an abstract.

Please note: you have to create an EasyChair account before you can submit your abstract. To do so, follow the instructions on the EasyChair website.

Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts should be 400 words maximum (without references), and written in English (please provide glosses or translations for examples in other languages). The abstract should have a title, but the author’s name, academic affiliation, and email address should be indicated on a separate sheet, where it should also be specified whether the abstract is intended as a basis for a general session talk or a poster presentation.

Metaphor Festival goes Amsterdam!

Metaphor Lab Amsterdam is delighted to announce that the next Metaphor Festival will take place in Amsterdam from 31 August through 3 September 2016.

The Metaphor Festival is an annual conference on the use of figurative language and other modes of figurative expression. It used to be arranged by the Department of English at Stockholm University. From 2006 through 2015, a series of ten successful conferences was held in Stockholm bringing together researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines, working within different theoretical and methodological paradigms in a creative, internationally oriented, and friendly atmosphere. The Stockholm organizers have now asked whether the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam can continue this tradition, and we are more than happy to do so.

For more information and the call for papers, check Metaphor Festival ’16.

We hope to meet you all in Amsterdam!

Best,

The Metaphor Festival ’16 organizing Committee

Gerard Steen
Amber Boeynaems
Marianna Bolognesi
Britta Brugman
Christian Burgers
Romy van den Heerik

NWO grant for ‘Resistance to Metaphor’ program

NWO has granted the ‘Resistance to Metaphor’ program!

The cognitive revolution in metaphor studies has recently led to growing interest in metaphor as a device for conceptualization or framing such as calling cancer research a ‘war on cancer’ or labeling the increase of Islamic influence in the west a ‘tsunami’. What has been entirely ignored in this context, however, is the fact that the typically implicit properties of metaphors as devices for conceptualization and framing are also resisted in various ways in specific discourse practices. Such resistance seems difficult to activate and formulate: it is not self-evident why or how one would resist Nixon’s ‘war on cancer’ or Wilders’ ‘tsunami of islamization’. This requires specific linguistic, conceptual and communicative skills, special analytical and argumentative effort, and particular discourse conditions. There are some critical studies of less desirable aspects of metaphors by linguists, but how language users themselves (may) resist metaphor in actual practice has remained off the agenda, in spite of its scientific and societal importance.

This program will elaborate an innovative analytical framework in theoretical and empirical terms in order to answer the question when and how people can resist metaphor, and why. It will look at resistance to metaphor as a form of counter-argumentation and design a new, integrated theory combining a three-dimensional model of metaphor in language use (Steen, 2011a) with a pragma-dialectical (Van Eemeren, 2010) theory of argumentation. The program will yield an encompassing analytical model, three empirical studies in three distinct discourse practices, and experimental findings of people’s practices and abilities to resist metaphor.

Rachel Giora writes about The Defaultness Hypothesis

This year, the members of our international advisory board tell us about their current research by writing a short text about it for the website.

Rachel Giora from Tel Aviv University (Israel) has written the first text, about her ongoing research concerning The Defaultness Hypothesis. You can read her text here.

Call for Papers: MIPVU in multiple languages

In 2010, Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayr and Pasma published a detailed guidebook for a method for linguistic metaphor identification, widely known as “MIPVU” (Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam) – an expanded version of the earlier Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) and the ‘Pragglejaz’ procedure. MIPVU provides a step-by-step protocol for identifying metaphors in discourse in a valid, transparent, and replicable way. It advocates the use of corpus-based dictionaries as tools to help identify both clear and borderline cases of three types of linguistic metaphor:
1) indirect metaphor, when there is a contrast between contextual and basic senses that may be attributed to comparison
2) direct metaphor, when there is no contrast between contextual and basic senses despite an underlying metaphorical reasoning, and
3) implicit metaphor, due to an underlying cohesive link in the discourse referring to an identifiable metaphor.

Both MIPVU and MIP were originally developed for linguistic metaphor identification in English discourse. Given the idiosyncrasies of individual languages, the application of either procedure to languages other than English necessarily entails adjustments to the procedure. We therefore invite scholars working on metaphor identification in general, and MIPVU/MIP in particular, in languages other than English to contribute their innovative research to a thematic volume “MIPVU in multiple languages”.

For more information, see the CfP.

Volume 4 of Metaphor in Language, Cognition and Communication is out

The fourth volume of the book series ‘Metaphor in Language, Cognition and Communication’ is out! The book is titled ‘Metaphor in specialist discourse’ and is edited by Herrmann and Berber Sardinha (Göttingen University / São Paulo Catholic University).

This chapter introduces the overall purpose, theoretical background, and structure of this collective volume. We start with our initial motivation, advancing the empirical study of metaphor in specialist discourse. Matching our goal, depicting metaphor use across a range of specialist domains and communities of discourse, we give an overview of the individual articles. The main emphasis, however, is on sketching a model of metaphor use in specific and popularized discourse settings that serves as a framework for the volume. Specifically, we draw on the latest discourse- and cognition-oriented metaphor studies, in particular conceptual metaphor theory, which we link to genre and register studies. We propose that aspects of discourse variability are the beginning, not an afterthought, of accurate empirical metaphor studies.

Kiki Renardel de Lavalette nominated for VU University master thesis prize

Kiki Renardel de Lavalette is nominated for the VU University, Faculty of Humanities, master thesis prize 2016, with her thesis in which she analyses presidential speeches and tries to identify moral language by comparing two methods of corpus analysis.

Wednesday the 27th of January 2016, one of the ten nominees will be awarded the thesis prize during the Gruatuate Seminar.