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T. (Tina) Krennmayr, dr

Telephone:+31 20 59 88742
Room nr:11a-37
E-mail:t.krennmayr@vu.nl
Unit:faculteit der letteren (taal en communicatie)
Position:Universitair docent

Department of Language and Communication
Metaphor Lab

Fax: +31-(0)20-5986500

Research interests

Metaphor in (news) discourse, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, applied cognitive linguistics, metaphor in the language classroom

Teaching

Lexis (BA)
Talk, Talkers, Talking (BA)
Global English (BA)
Metaphor in Language (MA)
Metaphor, Theory and Application (MA)

(all Department of Language and Communication, VU University Amsterdam, NL)

Introduction to Linguistics and Languages of the World. Department of English, Duke Univeristy, USA
Intermediate German I. Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, Duke University, USA

Research

Metaphor in Newspapers

While the word “metaphor” reminds people of literature or poetry, metaphorical language is all around us. Take newspapers: “Wall Street has been hitting new peaks” and “prices remain high”. Prices are not physically higher and there are no mountaintops that Wall Street is literally touching. Because we understand what it means to be at a higher location, we also understand the use of “high” and “peaks” in more abstract contexts such as news articles. This sort of metaphor use is a window onto the ways we think about and understand the world, and how we represent thoughts through language.

Journalistic writing has been a welcome source of natural language data for metaphor research. However, most studies on metaphor in news have been small-scale or restricted in their focus, investigating only a small set of metaphors, or have lacked a transparent method of metaphor identification. My research presents the first investigation of metaphorically used words in newspaper articles based on a systematic and transparent method of metaphor identification that captures all metaphorical language in a corpus of newspaper articles from a subcorpus of the British National Corpus.

Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, I examine the distribution, form, function and patterns of metaphorical language in news texts compared to its use in the registers fiction, academic texts and conversation. Besides using cognitive linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse-analytical approaches, I also do alpsycholinguistic research to investigate the influence of metaphor conventionality and metaphor signaling on people’s mental representation of texts.

VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus Online

In a collaborative effort, my research on metaphor in newspapers has produced a database of about 190,000 words of real language data annotated for metaphorical language use (VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus). I am currently building an online environment making the database accessible to the metaphor research community through easy-to-use search tools (in collaboration with Onno Huber, Metaphor Lab Amsterdam).

Metaphor in the Business English Classroom

Click here for my project on metaphor in the English language classroom (in collaboration with Constanze Juchem-Grundmann, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany).

Master's thesis
Krennmayr, T. (2005). “While the synchronized swimmer was practicing for the Olympics, he was supported by his wife.” Gender Stereotypes and Inferred Referential Gender in German L1 – English L2 speakers. MA thesis.

I examined the interplay of lexical, referential and grammatical gender in German native speakers learning English as a foreign language. More specifically, I showed that semantic meaning interacts with grammatical gender in German-English bilinguals and I suggested new ways to design materials for German native speakers learning English.

Publications

Dissertation

Krennmayr, T. (2011). Metaphor in Newspapers. Utrecht: LOT dissertation series, 276.

Click here to download my dissertation.

Books

Steen, G.J., Dorst A.G., Herrmann, J.B., Kaal, A.A., Krennmayr, T., Pasma, T. (2010). A method for linguistic metaphor identification. From MIP to MIPVU. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Peer reviewed

Steen, G.J., Dorst A.G., Herrmann, J.B., Kaal, A.A., Krennmayr, T. (2010). Metaphor in usage. Cognitive Linguistics, 21 (4): 757-788.
Juchem-Grundmann, C. & Krennmayr, T. (accepted). From MIPping to mapping: Corpus-informed integration of metaphor in materials for the business English classroom. In: S. De Knop & T. De Rycker, F. Boers (eds.), Fostering Language Teaching Efficiency Through Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krennmayr, T. (2008). Using Dictionaries in Linguistic Metaphor Identification. In N.L. Johannesson & D.C. Minugh (Eds.), Selected Papers from the 2006 and 2007 Stockholm Metaphor Festivals. Stockholm: Department of English, Stockholm University, 97-115.
Andrews, E. & Krennmayr, T. (2007). Cross-cultural linguistic realizations of conceptualizations of anger: Revisiting cognitive and pragmatic paradigms. Glossos, SEELRC.

Book reviews

Krennmayr,T. (2009). Review of Confronting Metaphor in Use. An applied linguistic approach by Mara Sophia Zanotto, Lynne Cameron and Marilda C. Cavalcanti (eds.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008. Metaphor and Symbol 24 (1), 60-62.

Conference proceedings

Juchem-Grundmann, Constanze & Krennmayr, Tina (2008). The role of metaphor in teaching English for specific purposes. LAUD Papers.

Corpora

Steen, G.J., Dorst A.G., Herrmann, J.B., Kaal, A.A., Krennmayr, T. (2010). VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus.

Other activities

Conference Presentations:

CRAL 2009, University of La Rioja, ES (29-31 October 2009)
Contributed Talk: “Metaphoric schemas in language comprehension.”
ST&D, Rotterdam, NL (26-28 July 2009)
Poster: “Verifying manual linguistic and conceptual metaphor analysis by the semantic annotation tool Wmatrix”
Corpus Linguistics 2009 (CL2009), Liverpool, UK (20-23 July 2009)
Contributed Talk: “Deductive versus inductive approaches to metaphor identification”
30th TABU Dag 2009, Groningen, NL (11-12 June 2009)
Contributed Talk: “Recalling extended metaphors in news discourse”
Third International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association (GCLA), Leipzig DE (September 2008)
Contributed Talk: “Identifying Linguistic Metaphor in news texts”
Seventh International Conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM 7), Cáceres, ES (May 2008):
Contributed Talk: “Identifying Linguistic Metaphor in news texts”
Seventh International Conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM 7), Cáceres, ES (May 2008):
Workshop: “Uncovering Metaphor - From Linguistic Expression to conceptual structure in five steps”
(together with Steen, G.J., Dorst A.G., Kaal, A.A. & Pasma, T.)
33rd International LAUD Symposium: Cognitive Approaches to Second/Foreign Language Processing: Theory and Pedagogy. Landau/Pfalz, DE (March 2008)
Contributed Talk: “The Role of Metaphor in teaching English for specific purposes.”
(together with Juchem-Grundmann, C.)
Österreichische Linguistiktagung (ÖLT), Innsbruck, AT (October 2007)
Contributed Talk: “Using dictionaries in linguistic metaphor identification”
Metaphor Festival, Stockholm, SE (September 2007):
Contributed Talk: “Using dictionaries in linguistic metaphor identification”
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC), Krakow, PL (July 2007):
Poster: “An annotation system to extend the functionality of MIP”

Conference organization:

Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference (RaAM08)
30 June – 3 July 2010, VU University Amsterdam, NL