RaAM conference
RaAM 11: Metaphor in the Arts, in Media and Communication
The 11th conference of RaAM – the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor will be held at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, 1– 4 July, 2016.
RaAM is committed to the study of metaphor, metonymy and other forms of figurative expression in all domains of life and with a particular focus on the application of metaphor research to real-life issues. With the 2016 theme “Metaphor in the Arts, in Media and Communication”, the conference RaAM 11 will embrace this central thought by putting the spotlight on ways of metaphorical communication – often beyond the scope of solely language-based discourse – in some of the most prominent areas of metaphor usage.
RaAM 11 wants to provide a platform for research from various fields that regard metaphor as a fundamental principle of communication in the realm of the arts as well as in different forms of media and every-day communication. The conference aims to explore metaphor and metaphor usage in contexts that operate on a broad range of sensory data and different levels of imagery. This includes film and other audio-visual media, literature, poetry, architecture, theatre, painting, music and dance as well as production design, social media and face-to-face communication.
The conference will feature plenary lectures by:
- Jennifer M. Barker – Georgia State University
- Petra Gehring – Technische Universität Darmstadt
- José Mario Gutierrez Marquez – Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
- Irene Mittelberg – RWTH Aachen
Different Metaphor Lab members will present their work at the RaAM conference. These are their abstracts:
Visual metaphors in the wild: How visual metaphors in app icons boost app downloads
Christian Burgers, Allison Eden
When looking at the types of visual metaphors, we found that contextual metaphors (in which only the source is visually present) were more associated with positive consumer response than the other types of visual metaphors. A closer analysis shows that these contextual metaphors may have been more conventional than the other types, suggesting the need to also include the conventionality/novelty dimension in research on the persuasiveness of visual metaphors. Implications will be discussed at the conference.
How to Identify Moral Language in Presidential Speeches: A comparison between two methods of corpus analysis
Kiki Y. Renardel de Lavalette, Gerard J. Steen, Christian Burgers
In Moral Politics, Lakoff (2002/1996) proposes that conservatives and liberals metaphorically think of the state as a family, with the government fulfilling the role of a parent and its people the role of the grown-up children. However, conservatives and liberals have very different ideas of what constitutes the ideal family: the conservative worldview centers around the Strict Father model, while the liberal worldview centers around the Nurturant Parent model. Lakoff (2002/1996) argues that these two models of the ideal family each constitute a distinct system of moral concepts, which in turn leads to diverging perspectives on political issues such as abortion, welfare programs, and crime.
Several studies (e.g. Cienki, 2005; Deason & Gonzales, 2012; Moses & Gonzales, 2014; Ohl et al., 2013; Wolters, 2012) have examined political discourse to test Lakoff’s assertions. However, at least two distinct methods of corpus analysis have been used. Social-psychological scholars have studied political speech to identify any expression that could be considered an example of one of the two models, without considering the metaphoricity of the expression (Deason & Gonzales, 2012; Moses & Gonzales, 2014; Ohl et al., 2013). Contrarily, cognitive linguists have analyzed political texts to find metaphorical language that could be ascribed to one of the two family models (Cienki, 2005; Wolters, 2012). Since these different studies yielded diverging results, this raises the question whether these differences are due to the different corpora used for the different studies, or to the different methods that were used. In order to address this question, we applied two different methods (one based on the social-psychological approach, Moses & Gonzales, 2014; one based on the cognitive-linguistic approach, Wolters, 2012) to the same corpus of American political speeches.
Results show that, while applied to the exact same corpus, the two methods lead to different findings. The two methods claim to measure the same phenomenon, but they evidently do not seem to do so. Thereby, we demonstrate that conclusions based on results obtained by methods as discussed in this paper should be taken with caution, because using one method over the other can possibly be a large factor in the eventual results. At the conference, we discuss some issues concerning the two methods that could explain the differences between the outcomes, and which could be improved upon to increase the validity and reliability of both methods.
Metaphor, part-of speech and register variation: Methodological challenges and corpus research
Tina Krennmayr
Apart from a handful of exceptions (e.g. Deignan, 2005) there is surprisingly little research on the relationship between metaphor and parts-of-speech even though part of speech has been shown to play different roles in language use (e.g. Cameron 2003), has an impact on metaphor recognition (e.g. Steen 2004) and interpretation (e.g. Goatly 2011), and has valuable practical relevance, such as in foreign language teaching (MacArthur & Littlemore, 2008).
Metaphor can be found across all major parts-of-speech. Thus every researcher working on metaphor in discourse encounters the issue of part-of-speech in the very first stages of data collection. For example, is the verb to squirrel in ‘to squirrel away a fortune’ metaphorically connected to the noun squirrel, which refers to an animal? Is it possible to detect metaphor in delexicalized verbs?
I will discuss methodological challenges in coding metaphor across different word classes that will be encountered by any researcher identifying metaphor in natural discourse or selecting lexical items for experimental stimulus materials. I will also show that metaphor reveals its unique distribution in different registers across different word classes, focusing on the use of nouns and verbs in the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus.
Crazy creative co-created metaphors: a corpus analysis
Studying metaphor production often entails a methodological problem (Flor & Hadar, 2005). As such, it is difficult to create a setting in which metaphors are produced naturally and with sufficient frequency. Until now, metaphor production has been studied in experimental settings (Utsumi & Sakamoto, 2015), interview settings (Fainsilber & Ortony, 1987) and in creative writing (Williams-Whitney, Mio & Whitney, 1992). In this study we aim to overcome the methodological problem and focus on metaphor production in a real-life setting in which metaphors are produced naturally, frequently and following a uniform set-up.
Our case concerns the Dutch anti-smoking campaign ‘smoking is so outdated’, initiated by the Dutch Cancer Society. This campaign ran from 2012 to 2014 and focused on young non-smokers. The campaign used co-creation (Zwass, 2010) to change smoking behavior through altering social norms, by asking the audience to finish a slogan starting with “Smoking is sóóó…”. This way, the campaign invited its audience to co-create a slogan communicating that smoking is outdated. Audience members could post their slogans on Facebook and Twitter.
We analyzed 441 campaign and target audience slogans and found that some people used metonymy (“smoking is sóóó 1900”) or attribution (“smoking is sóóó bad”) to complete the slogans. However, many others saw the slogan “Smoking is sóóó” as the start of an A=B metaphor and compared smoking to something outdated (“Smoking is sóóó Windows XP”) or something generally negative (“Smoking is sóóó driving without a license”) from an alien source domain.
To conclude how people exactly co-created the metaphor, our analysis includes details of language use: length, grammatical structure, modifiers, negations, symbols, emoticons, capitals, transitivity, proper names, in-group words and urban language. This enables us to describe differences between the slogans made by the campaign and the audience on Twitter and Facebook to give further insight into the ways in which metaphors are co-created in real-life settings on communication media.
All metaphors have the same target domain (smoking) and the same invitation for making a comparison (is sóóó). Nevertheless, the sources people used varied in many respects. A preliminary analysis indicates that while some people followed the campaign slogans (“smoking is sóóó sandals and white socks!”), others were highly creative in constructing the source (“buying a Ferrari and not driving it” or “drinking bodily fluids from elephants through a straw”).