Romy van den Heerik

Workshop ‘Visual Metaphors, Intercultural Communication and Migration’ by Marianna Bolognesi

Before the beginning of the Intercultural Horizons Conference, Dr. Marianna Bolognesi will give a workshop entitled ‘Visual Metaphors, Intercultural Communication and Migration’ in Cagliari, Italy.

Description
Visual metaphors are highly structured images with ad-hoc created visual incongruences that capture the viewer’s attention and push her to build one or more petaphorical correspondences between concepts that are depicted or cued by the image itself.

Such images are commonly used in advertising to highlight specific features of the product to be sold (a facial cream depicted next to a dandelion, to cue the lightness and delicacy of its texture), in social campaigns (the globe depicted as a melting cone, to suggest the effects of global warming), in political cartoons (recently, prophet Mohammad depicted as a patient on a wheelchair and as other non-sacred characters, in Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons), as well as in several illustrations used for educational and artistic purposes.

The power of visual metaphors is multifaceted. In the field of intercultural communication visual metaphors allow expression of concepts that might not have a linguistic equivalent in a foreign language, concepts that appear as taboo in a foreign culture, concepts with a heavy emotional connotation, or abstract concepts that are otherwise hard to express through words. For these reasons, knowing how these images are constructed is crucial for intercultural practitioners.

In this workshop, the inner structure of these images will be investigated, and different models for visual metaphor identification and analysis will be presented and applied to images that relate to the field of intercultural communication and migration. The workshop is led by Dr. Marianna Bolognesi, who has been recently awarded with a EU Marie Curie research fellowship. Dr. Bolognesi is currently working on visual metaphors at the Metaphor Lab.

Sıla Gen successfully defended her PhD thesis

Monday 7 September, Sıla successfully defended her PhD thesis “Metaphors in Uzbek” (Özbekçede Metaforlar) at Cukurova University. Prof. Dr. Deniz Abik from Cukurova University was the supervisor of her thesis. She spend one year of her dissertation project at the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam under the supervision of Prof. dr. Gerard Steen. She examined the conceptual metaphors in Uzbek literary texts. Findings of the study show that conceptual metaphors are grounded in cultural, daily or bodily experiences; novel metaphors are merely used in Uzbek literary texts; and metaphors in Uzbek are in accordance with metaphors in Chinese and English.

Congratulations, Sıla!

PhD defence Patricia Pineda

Tuesday 15 September at 11:45, Patricia Pineda defends her PhD thesis Looking for and making sense of ‘special’ words. Metaphor recognition and interpretation by schoolchildren in the aula of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Main Building). Prof. dr. Gerard Steen is the promoter of Patricia’s thesis.

Patricia explored metaphor recognition and interpretation by 8 to 12 years-old children in literary and science text fragments. Her findings show an independent effect of school grade and reading comprehension, with children scoring considerably higher on interpretation than on recognition of metaphors.

Paula Pérez-Sobrino starts EMMA project

On October 5, 2015, dr. Paula Pérez-Sobrino will start her Marie Curie project: EMMA.

EMMA (European Multimodal Metaphor in Advertising) aims to redress the combination of metaphor and metonymy in multimodal settings (such as advertising) by testing figurative complexity and emotions, the impact of these on comprehension, accuracy of interpretation and advertising effectiveness. This project involves an interdisciplinary study that combines cognitive and physiological psychology with linguistic and marketing interpretations. A mixed-methods approach of lab experiments and qualitative inquiry will assess the speed and depth of comprehension, the perceived appeal, and the physiological effect of static and video advertisements on participants from three linguistic and cultural backgrounds (English, Spanish, and Chinese). If advertisers, charities and NGOs target, and are sensitive to, linguistic and cultural differences in metaphors, local and international communities can benefit from specific, appropriate and ethical advertising.

This project is based at the University of Birmingham and will run for two years.

People

Paula Pérez-Sobrino (Research Fellow, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics): expertise on interactional patterns between multimodal metaphor and metonymy.
Jeannette Littlemore (Principal Investigator, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics): expertise on metaphor, cross-linguistic variation and linguistic analysis.
David Houghton (Co-Investigator, Department of Marketing, Birmingham Business School): expertise on marketing, viralisation, and experimental experience.

Partner institutions

Academic

Metaphor Lab at the University of Amsterdam & Free University of Amsterdam, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands): Prof Gerard Steen and Dr Charles Forceville will provide their expertise in multimodal metaphor identification analysis. Likewise, EMMA will establish a connection with Marianna Bolognesi (Marie Curie fellow), who coordinates the annotation of Vismet, the first broad scale corpus of visual metaphors) in order to coordinate the joint organisation of workshops, conference panels, and training sessions. The Metaphor Lab will provide access to data and contact with people working in advertising both in the public and private.
University of Nottingham-Ningbo (Ningbo, China): Dr Margaret Dowens will bring her expertise on psyhcolinguistics and will provide facilities for the testing Chinese participants.
University of La Rioja (Logroño, Spain): Prof. Ruiz de Mendoza and Dr. Lorena Pérez Hernández will assess the project on theoretical issues. Additionally, they will provide facilities for the testing Chinese participants.

Non-academic

EMMA will get real by collaborating with the private sector.

Three advertising companies will posit real world problems and needs. The aim beneath these collaborations is to achieve a more down-to-earth, skilled, and business-oriented analysis and consideration of the data.

Publicis Chemistry London (http://www.publicischemistry.com/)
VCCP Spain (http://www.vccp.es/)
Anuncios.com (http://www.anuncios.com/)

Review of Metaphor in Psychotherapy

Wen Ma and Yijin Wu of the School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University, P.R. China, reviewed Metaphor in Psychotherapy: A Descriptive and Prescriptive Analysis ( 2013) by Dennis Tay. This book is part of the book series Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication.

You can read the review here!

Blog by Gudrun Reijnierse from Lancaster

Come rain or shine… 3 months of British weather (and work)

For the past three months, I’ve been working on my PhD thesis at Lancaster University as a visiting researcher. During this stay, not a single day passed that I did not think or talk about the weather, and as it happens, the state of the Lancastrian weather seems to almost perfectly coincide with important academic moments during my visit.

In the first month of my stay, I sent a grey and rainy picture of Lancaster campus to a friend. ‘See, I told you’, she replied, ‘why would you go to rainy England if you can also go to sunny Santa Barbara?!?’ My friend’s response made me ask myself: why did I come to Lancaster, other than to simply ‘work on my thesis’? As a result, I spent a lot of time rethinking my PhD project and my approach to the whole matter. The weather remained grey and rainy, and with only a year left before the end of my project, I wasn’t sure (anymore) whether my approach was actually going to work…

Over the course of my visit, the weather steadily improved. In the second month of my stay, rainy days – during which I struggled with the complex theoretical aspects of my project – alternated with sunny days – during which I found even more interesting manifestations of metaphor in my corpus than I already had. As time passed by, I had many fruitful and insightful discussions with various people, both in Lancaster and back home, and things started to fall (back) into place.

Sometime during my third month in the UK, Lancaster ‘suffered’ from a heatwave, with temperatures reaching an ‘amazing’ 27 (!!) degrees. People wouldn’t stop talking about how summer had finally arrived. And yet again, the weather perfectly reflected what happened in academic terms: The heat wave coincided with the visit of a friend whose PhD project is similar to mine, and after some intense discussions, for a moment I felt like we could solve all problems in the world (of metaphor) by simply slightly adjusting my perspective on the whole matter…

Of course, the heatwave only lasted for a few days. And of course, the feeling of invincibility was replaced by uncertainties about the adjusted approach. However, the long-term weather forecast for Amsterdam looks promising, and I am looking forward to coming back home, with a backpack full of inspiration and ‘the summer in my head’ 🙂

Lancaster University.

Invited talk by Ken McRae

Friday 11 September, 15:00-17.00, Metaphor Lab Amsterdam and the CogVim project organize an invited talk by prof. Ken McRae (Department of Psychology, and Brain & Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, Canada). His talk will be entitled ‘The Importance of Event Knowledge in the Organization and Structure of Semantic Memory’.

Location:
University of Amsterdam
P.C. Hoofthuis, Room 1.04
Spuistraat 134, Amsterdam

If you would like to attend, please register by sending an e-mail to m.m.bolognesi2@uva.nl.

The lecture will be recorded! So if you can’t make it to the event you’ll be able to watch it online afterwards: http://webcolleges.uva.nl/Mediasite/Play/02746a681ea54f889bfa57e2afb14ff91d