Last call Symposium ‘Abstract Concepts’

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Abstract Concepts: Debating Their Structure, Processing, and Modeling.

Date: 18-Nov-2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

https://abstractconceptsnet.wordpress.com/

Description
On which dimensions of meaning do abstract and concrete concepts differ? How does perceptual experience affect abstract concept processing and representation? What is the role of language in shaping and indexing the content of concrete vs. abstract concepts? How and in which contexts are abstract concepts understood through metaphors? Abstract concepts are a controversial and widely debated topic, within the theoretical discussion about the embodied vs symbolic nature of language and meaning. The aim of this project is to bring together current views about the structure, processing, and modeling of abstract concepts.

Program
8 eminent scholars have been invited to Amsterdam to discuss the nature, structure, processing, and modeling of abstract concepts in various disciplines. During the symposium the panelists will present in turn their view and will receive structured comments (prepared in advance) from their peers. A general discussion among all panelists and the audience will follow.

Invited Keynote Speakers and Provisional titles
Prof. Friedemann Pulvermueller – Concrete mechanisms for abstract meaning
Prof. Gun Semin – The place of metaphors in the order of things
Prof. Piek Vossen – Granularity and identity of event descriptions
Dr. Diane Pecher – Curb your embodiment
Prof. Max Louwerse – Language statistics explain conceptual processing
Prof. Alessandro Lenci – The Emotions of Abstracts: A Distributional Semantic Analysis Prof.
Ken McRae – Situations, perceptual information and abstract concepts
Prof. Gabriella Vigliocco – Learning and processing abstract concepts: the role of language and the role of emotion

Call for Papers
Given the structure and program of the symposium, with 8 keynote speakers, submissions are welcome (and encouraged!) for poster presentations. Posters will be displayed on the conference venue for the whole day and actively discussed over the lunch break, which will take place at the conference venue.

Applicants are asked to submit (max.) 250 words abstracts to M.M.Bolognesi2@uva.nl.

Registration info can be found on the symposium website: https://abstractconceptsnet.wordpress.com/https://abstractconceptsnet.wordpress.com/

Submission deadline (extended): 30^th September
Notification of acceptance: 3^rd  October
Symposium date: 18^th November

The event is organized by the COGVIM project team (EU Marie Curie IEF, awarded to Dr. Marianna Bolognesi – n° 629076) and sponsored by ABC Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, Network Institute, and KNAW Dutch Royal Academy of Science.

Albert Katz visits Metaphor Lab

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On July 7, 2016, Prof. Dr. Albert Katz (Western University, Canada) visited the Metaphor Lab for a small-scale symposium in his honor, hosted by Dr. Christian Burgers.

Dr. Katz delivered the opening talk entitled “Structural and social aspects of metaphor (with side trips to irony and puns)”, in which he made a distinction between cognitive (‘structural’) and social-psychological (‘social’) studies into figurative language conducted in his lab. Dr. Katz mentioned both some of his classic studies, as well as new (and unpublished) studies.

Other presentations were delivered by members of the Metaphor Lab and staff of the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit. Amber Boeynaems and Britta Brugman discussed two systematic reviews they recently conducted on metaphorical framing on political communication. Marianna Bolognesi presented the results from her Marie-Curie funded project CogVIM and showed how linguistic and visual metaphor differ in the kind of similarities they evoke. Camiel Beukeboom gave his perspective on the role of figurative language in stereotyping, and presented new empirical results on the Irony Bias in relation to stereotype formation. Kiki Renardel de Lavalette presented a comparison of using two corpus-analytic methods to test Lakoff’s Theory of Moral Reasoning. The symposium was closed by Christian Burgers who talked about the quantitative results of his corpus analysis on figurative framing in news discourse (conducted as part of his NWO VENI project).

HIP: a new Hyperbole Identification Procedure

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Christian Burgers, Britta Brugman, Kiki Renardel de Lavalette and Gerard Steen just published their article ‘HIP: A method for linguistic hyperbole identification in discourse’ in Metaphor and Symbol:

This article introduces the Hyperbole Identification Procedure (HIP), a first systematic method for identifying linguistic hyperbole in discourse. We start by comparing existing definitions of linguistic hyperbole. Based on the commonalities shared by these definitions, we provide our operational definition of hyperbole as “an expression that is more extreme than justified given its ontological referent.” The next section argues why it is useful to identify hyperbole, as with metaphor in Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU), at the level of lexical units, and subsequently introduces the steps of HIP. We follow up with two sample analyses of HIP in practice. First, we show how to unitize and analyze one complete sample sentence. Second, we present sample analyses of a number of selected cases. Then we present data showing that HIP can be reliably applied to a sample corpus of Dutch news texts. We end with discussing applications and implications of using HIP in corpus research.