Integrated metaphor description project - metaphors for COVID and the pandemic, and metaphors for global climate change.
Eve Sweetser, Professor
Linguistics
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
This group is a multilingual project, examining discourse about COVID-19 and about global climate change, in North American English, French and Spanish varieties, as well as in French of France. (A side project on Mandarin metaphor is not funded, but is also ongoing.)
We are using the Coronavirus corpus created on the COCA corpus site, and other corpora which we are building. The first and continuing effort has been to identify metaphoric mappings involved. The new wave of work is designing and carrying out Mechanical Turk experiments to test the effect of metaphoric stimuli on subjects' construals. It has been shown that in other areas, priming with metaphoric language can affect reasoning - e.g. reading about crime as an epidemic vs as a dangerous wild beast can sway readers to prefer social/health solutions as opposed to encarceration. We would like to find out how metaphoric framing affects readers' framings of COVID.
Two earlier stages of this group's research on cancer and cancer metaphors have been presented in 2018 at the Researching and Applying Metaphor conference, and in 2019 at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, and are being written up for publication. More were presented at RaAM in 2021, 2022, and 2023; others - including work on climate change - are scheduled for presentation in August 2023 at the ICLC.
Role: Analysis of texts, identification of metaphors, and assistance in building the database of metaphors. Also, assist in Mechanical Turk or Prolifics data-gathering and organization.
In the past, students doing this work have helped the project make progress, and learned a lot more about the nitty-gritty of metaphor analysis. Some of our undergraduate assistants have as a result produced professional research papers and presented them at conferences.
Qualifications: Cognitive linguistics background is a plus. IDEALLY should have taken Linguistics 106 and/or 105 (or some other cognitive linguistics class involving work on metaphor) and done well - or done well in other linguistics classes and be ready to dive in and do reading on metaphor analysis. Basic database management skills are needed.
French or Spanish skills would be a plus, as would any bioscience background (useful for reading the medical literature). Mandarin language skills are starting to be useful too.
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Mixed, some meetings on campus. The group includes researchers based in Canada, Spain and France as well as other UC campuses.
Related website: http://
Social Sciences