Research Meeting: RaAM presentations
During this Metaphor Lab research meeting Kiki Renardel de Lavalette and Romy van den Heerik will present the talk they prepared for the RaAM conference in Berlin (1-4 July). Suggestions are more than welcome to improve their talks for 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.
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”).
Location:
Potgieterszaal, University Library
Singel 421-427
1012 WP Amsterdam