News | Metaphor Lab Amsterdam

Three PhD positions in Linguistics

The University of Amsterdam announces three vacant PhD positions as part of the NWO (Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research) funded project Resistance to metaphor, led by professor Gerard Steen. Applications are now invited from excellent candidates who wish to conduct corpus research on resistance to metaphor in various genres in three distinct domains: public discourse, popular science, and government and politics. Each of the PhD projects focuses on one of these domains.

Read more about these positions on the UvA website.

Paper on Irony Bias in Communication Research

Christian Burgers and Camiel Beukeboom published their article ‘Stereotype Transmission and Maintenance Through Interpersonal Communication: The Irony Bias‘ in Communication Research.

In interpersonal communication, stereotypes are predominantly transmitted through language. Linguistic bias theory presupposes that speakers systematically vary their language when communicating stereotype-consistent and stereotype-inconsistent information. We investigate whether these findings can be extended to verbal irony use. The irony bias posits that irony is more appropriate to communicate stereotype-inconsistent than stereotype-consistent information. Three experiments support this hypothesis by showing that irony is found more appropriate (Experiments 1-2) and used more often (Experiment 3) in stereotype-inconsistent than in stereotype-consistent situations. Furthermore, linguistic biases have important communicative consequences, because they implicitly serve to maintain stereotypic expectancies. Experiment 4 shows that irony shares this characteristic with other linguistic biases, in that irony—compared to literal language—leads to more external attribution. Taken together, these results indicate that stereotypic expectancies are subtly revealed and confirmed by verbal irony, and that verbal irony plays an important role in stereotype communication and maintenance.

Jeannette Littlemore and Paula Perez-Sobrino: “EMMA”

As a member of the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam international advisory board, Jeannette Littlemore (University of Birmingham) has written a short text together with Paula Perez-Sobrino to inform us about her current research.

You can read about EMMA here.

Volume 5 of Metaphor in Language, Cognition and Communication is out

The fifth volume of the book series ‘Metaphor in Language, Cognition and Communication’ is out! The book is titled ‘Metaphor and Communication’ and is edited by Elisabetta Gola and Francesca Ervas (University of Cagliari).

This collection of papers presents different views on metaphor in communication. The overall aim is to show that the communicative dimension of metaphor cannot be reduced to its conceptual and/or linguistic dimension. The volume addresses two main questions: does the communicative dimension of metaphor have specific features that differentiate it from its linguistic and cognitive dimensions? And how could these specific properties of communication change our understanding of the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of metaphor? The authors of the papers collected in this volume offer answers to these questions that raise new interests in metaphor and communication.

Tony Veale: “Ways of Seeing and Not Seeing with Metaphor”

As a members of the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam international advisory board, Tony Veale (University College Dublin) has written a short text to inform us about his current research.

You can read “Ways of Seeing and Not Seeing with Metaphor”, here.

Oration Gerard Steen: “Life is life”

On Friday February 12, Gerard Steen will hold an oration entitled ‘”Life is life”: changing perspective in linguistics’, accepting his professorship in applied linguistics. The oration will start at 16:00 in the aula of the University of Amsterdam, entrance Singel 411, corner of Spui.

Afterwards you can watch the oration online here.

“Life is life:” Changing perspectives in linguistics

What is the relation between language and discourse? Are Dutch conversations different than English or Chinese ones? Are Dutch novels different than English or Chinese novels? And what about advertisements, business meetings, lectures? From one perspective they are the same in spite of the language differences: you do not have to learn again what it is to have a conversation, read a novel, or participate in a meeting when you are Dutch and have to do this in English or Chinese (but you do have to learn another language first). On tv, in film, and on the internet we see dozens of these kinds of discourse situations in a different language per day and we automatically know how the discourse works, but if the subtitling breaks down, most of us have a big problem. This means that discourse (conversations, novels, and so on) is something totally different than language (Dutch, English, Chinese, etc.) and that discourse is reasonably independent from language.

This is a different perspective on language and discourse than is common in linguistics, as in structural-functionalist grammar, cognitive linguistics, and pragmatics, where language and discourse are seen as tightly connected. What is this different perspective and how can we use it for language and discourse research and teaching? These are the questions I will address in this inaugural lecture.

I will show a new model of language and discourse and apply it to two ubiquitous phenomena in language and discourse: metaphor and argumentation. What does my model say about the way people speak, think and communicate by metaphor? What does it say about the way in which people use arguments in science, politics, the media, health care or organization and management and attempt to influence each other? And how can the model be used to generate applications in these domains for language and discourse interventions? A new program for the chair in Taalbeheersing (Language and discourse) will offer an answer by focusing on the notions of genre, genre event, genre knowledge and genre repertoire.

Metaphor Lab members present at Etmaal

The Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap 2016, organised by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under the aegis of NeFCA, will be held 4-5 February 2016 in Amsterdam. The theme of the 2016 conference is CLOSER: CONNECTING THROUGH INTIMATE COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES.

Metaphor Lab members will present their work at Etmaal:

– Britta Brugman, Christian Burgers, Gerard Steen – Reclassifying political frames: A systematic review of metaphorical framing

– Amber Boeynaems, Christian Burgers, Elly Konijn, Gerard Steeen – Different perspectives on the effects of metaphorical framing of political issues: A systematic review

– Kiki Renardel de Lavalette, Gerard Steen, Christian Burgers – How to identify moral language in Presidential speeches: A comparison between two methods of content analysis

– Camiel Beukeboom, Christian Burgers – How ironic remarks about social-category members contribute to stereotype formation

See the website for more information.