Words in and out of their social context: The case of hyperbole

Topic and scope	The topic of reliable identification of metaphor and irony has been on the academic agenda for quite some time. For both figures, reliable methods for metaphor and irony identification have been identified. For metaphor, this is the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP; Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and its adapted and improved version MIP-VU (Steen et al., 2011). For irony, this is the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP, Burgers et al., 2011). However, for hyperbole, no reliable identification procedure exists. It is the goal of the current project to develop the Hyperbole Identification Procedure (HIP), along the lines of MIP, MIP-VU and VIP.
Duration	Sep 2014 – Nov 2015
Research question	How can hyperbole be identified in a reliable way in natural written discourse?
Method	Corpus analysis, experiments
Status	Network Institute Academy Assistant project
Researchers and supervisors	Academy assistants: Britta Brugman, Kiki Renardel de Lavalette Supervisors: Christian Burgers and Gerard Steen
Funding	KNAW/Network Institute Academy Assistant Grant