Anna Kaal

I was part of the VICI research programme "Metaphor in discourse: Linguistic forms, conceptual structures, and cognitive representations" led by dr Gerard Steen. This programme ran for five years and included the participation of four PhD researchers: Lettie Dorst, Julia Berenike Herrmann, Tina Krennmayr, and myself. It was located in the Department of English Language and Culture. The focus of our research programme was the relationship between metaphor as a cross-domain mapping and its linguistic form (in terms of rhetorical form, linguistic completeness, and metaphor signaling) in four different discourse domains (conversation, fiction, news texts, and academic texts). We compared these registers through quantitative and qualitative studies. We also included possible cognitive representations of metaphors in the minds of language users as part of our project. While I annotated linguistic metaphor in all four genres, my specific research focused on conversation.

I successfully defended my thesis in February 2012.

I am interested in theories of embodiment, the multimodal nature of conversation and the different building blocks that contribute to a message, but also in the way elements such as gesture, the way we speak and the way we think are interrelated.

At the moment I am doing a Master's programme to obtain my teaching degree. I teach English to secondary school pupils, a profession in which metaphor and gesture are continuously present and which may offer a topic for future applied research.

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