Presenting the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam

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Prof. dr Gerard Steen is the guest speaker at the ACLC seminar.

Abstract

In this talk I will present the new ACLC research program on metaphor in language and communication which is the basis of the work done in the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam (MLA). The MLA is a new addition to the ACLC research program, joining research projects from scholars in the humanities and the social sciences at UvA and VU. It is the product of an NWO Vici-program run between 2005 and 2010 and currently houses five themes in metaphor research that will be brief presented in a coherent framework focused on the future. The main research question addressed in this program is how metaphor is used in language and other modalities such as visuals to achieve which functions and effects in communication by which participants in which contexts. My work focuses on developing a theoretical model as well as reliable methods and resources (corpora) for researching this question, which will also be briefly discussed. The talk will end with a project proposal to the ACLC community: linguists of other languages than English are invited to get together in a series of dedicated research meetings in order to extrapolate our Metaphor Identification Procedure developed for English and applied to an excerpt of the British National Corpus. This procedure has had an increasing impact on the field with linguists from other languages and cultures approaching the lab with questions about its applicability to for instance romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, Slavic languages and Russian, Arabic, and so on. We could see whether there is an interest in the ACLC community to do this together and produce a joint book publication with other collaborators with the lab.