It’s a familiar situation: We gaze at a poem and wonder – what was the author trying to express? What was his or her intention in using that specific metaphor? And how should we, as readers, interpret it? Over the next two years, Carina Rasse, holder of the DOC-scholarship awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and currently working at the Department of English, will explore how metaphors emerge and how they are deciphered by readers.

Carina Rasse has specialised in contemporary lyrical works, so that she can interview authors about their creative processes associated with metaphors. In a first step, she approached fifty authors in the English-speaking world and asked the following questions: How would you describe your metaphors? What role do they play in your works? How do you go about creating metaphors? Thirty poets responded. One of them, the American-Canadian poet and assistant professor James Arthur, has invited Carina Rasse to visit him at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she will attend Arthur’s Creative Writing classes in February 2020. This will give her the opportunity to gain first-hand experience of how aspiring poets create metaphors. Furthermore, various insights provided by the authors during the interviews gave rise to interesting questions, which Carina Rasse would like to pursue further. This work doesn’t merely involve isolating specific terms as metaphors within poems; rather, the poem as a whole should often be understood metaphorically. Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which is predominately used for the examination of metaphors in the field of linguistics, cannot alone serve this purpose, as poems are too complex. For this reason, Carina Rasse will be devoting the months ahead to refining an innovative theoretical-empirical concept, which will allow a more profound exploration of the object of her investigation.

Launching this project, Carina Rasse, who had previously specialised in literary aspects of English and American Studies, has now forged a link to linguistics. Her interest in languages was influenced in part by her family background. Russian is her second mother tongue, while English, Italian and Latin were added during her school years. “Nonetheless, studying poems allows me to stay true to literature as well“, she tells us during the interview. Her work is supervised by Alexander Onysko. Thanks to the Young Scientists Mentoring programme at the University of Klagenfurt, Carina Rasse was able to gain the support of the renowned cognitive psychologist and leading metaphor scholar Raymond W. Gibbs as her mentor.

Carina Rasse completed both her Bachelor’s degree and her Master’s degree in English and American Studies in Klagenfurt. The Master’s degree in “Media and Convergence Management” added a valuable second pillar. However, as she tells us, research remains her primary aim: “Drafting and submitting the project proposal was quite a challenge, but the effort certainly paid off.” The ÖAW-DOC scholarship for the project titled “Poetic Metaphors: Creativity and Interpretation” will allow her to devote all her energy to her scientific endeavours for a period of two years.

Der Beitrag Immersed in a sea of words: Poetic metaphors erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.

Source: AAU TEWI

Artificial intelligence systems — for instance, in biomedicine — are often based on knowledge bases, which store
expert knowledge in machine readable form. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon that mistakes creep in while knowledge bases are created.
Such mistakes can have serious consequences, for example, if the system suggests a wrong medication for a patient. Finding such faults is, however, a very hard task, often just because of the sheer size of the knowledge bases.

For this reason, a team of researchers from the Department of Applied Informatics has developed the “OntoDebug” tool, which is used by people from all over the world. In an article that was recently published in the prestigious “Knowledge-Based Systems” journal, the usefulness of this tool could be scientifically validated by means of several user studies. In particular, it was shown that the effort neeed for the discovery of faults in knowledge bases is significantly reduced when OntoDebug is used.

For more information on OntoDebug, please check out here.

Der Beitrag “OntoDebug” – a development of the Applied Informatics in Klagenfurt erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.

Source: AAU TEWI

In her third post on this year’s excursion to Canada, Tamara Urach journals the group’s time in Montréal, the final stop on the students’ tour.

Montréal – Excusez-moi, parlez-vous Anglais?

Our third and last stop is probably the most French-infused location of North America – Montréal. We start our program on the day following our arrival on June 2, with our first point on the agenda being a two-hour historical group tour of Vieux-Montréal, where we also witness French-Canadians taking the French way of (love) life very seriously.

Other stops on our city tour lead us to the Stewart Museum and the Pointe-à-Callière Archaeological Museum, as well as the wonderful Château Ramezay, where the tour guides show us not only the artefacts in the museum, but also an awesome garden with plants used for different medicinal purposes. Another garden that some of us decide to visit is the Botanical Garden of Montréal, where the Chinese Garden and Native Garden amaze visitors everyday. Our question about where Mother Earth is (a beautiful living sculpture at the gardens, which is in fact, nowhere to be found), only earns amazed and confused faces.

Nature is also present on the Mont Royal, name giver of Montréal, which is more of a hill rather than a mountain (we might not want to tell the Québécoise). Nevertheless, the Mont Royal is a nice place for a relaxed afternoon, even some squirrels and a racoon begging for food cross our way both up and down the hill. Another highlight on the penultimate day is our group dinner at the Vieux-Port Steakhouse, where we apparently forget about money saving and decide to enjoy an extraordinary meal – French onion soup, steak, salmon fillet and delicious desserts such as crème brûlée and chocolate mousse cake are just some of the meals worth mentioning. After some drinks at a bar, we are all ready to go to sleep and rest before some individual activities on our last day, June 7. Some of us visit the Notre Dame Basilica in Montréal, others decide to make one last shopping trip at the Eaton Centre, before we gather for our trip to the airport at 3 p.m.

After a long flight back to Venice, we safely arrive at the airport and take our bus back to Austria. It’s always nice to come home to your loved ones. Canada and our trip there will for sure stay in our hearts, and suitcases full of souvenirs and minds full of fun memories will always remind us of this extraordinary trip.

Text and photos by Tamara Urach

Der Beitrag “O Canada” – Part 3 erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.

Source: AAU TEWI

The communication practised by politicians is highly calculated, supporting their aim to transport their own messages and to sway the voters. Applying a linguistic  perspective,  Marta Degani has studied speeches by US-American politicians, including election addresses by Barack Obama, but also by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“In the United States, political communication is conducted in a highly professionalized manner. Very little is left to chance”, Marta Degani (Department of English and American Studies) reports. Her research, along with additional studies by colleagues, has shown that numerous US-American politicians draw upon two “idealised” cognitive models in their language. These can be traced back to the linguist George Lakoff, who works with the model of the “strict father”  and  the “nurturant parent”. While the former model is based on authority, a hierarchical distribution of power, and a compelling leadership figure, the latter is characterised by equality, a horizontal distribution of power, and mutual solicitude. Depending on the socio-cultural setting in which someone grows up, she or he will favour one or the other model. “When politicians avail themselves of the most suitable respective model, when they use certain metaphors and concepts and tell matching “stories”, listeners are more likely to feel affected.”  Using this theory as a lens, Marta Degani analysed the election speeches held by Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, and came to a clear conclusion: “The role of the “nurturant parent” corresponds to his political credo.”

The art of “storytelling” as a communicative strategy has an important part to play in political communication. Here, too, Barack Obama serves as a good example, according to Marta Degani. “He tells various stories: About himself, about his provenance, his family, but he also tells stories about ordinary  American citizens. In addition, there are stories that depict America as a great nation.” When asked whether European politicians are also adept at telling stories, Degani responds: “Yes, though maybe not quite as skilled as their peers in the United States.”

Political language is heavily influenced by the prevailing culture. This is the case on a regional level, but it is also true historically. Marta Degani’s current observations have detected a trend towards anti-intellectualism, which is emerging as a social phenomenon, and is occasionally rendered visible in the shape of certain types of political populism. She found interesting proof of this in the so-called “announcement speeches” held by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2015, when they announced that they were running as presidential candidates. Degani used “readability tests” to examine the complexity of these addresses. One of the results: “Donald Trump’s speech can be comprehended by a 10-year-old child.” Here is another example using figures: “12 percent of the words in Clinton’s address are complex, while in Trump’s case, only 7.7 percent of words are complex. Moreover, on average, Clinton’s sentences consist of 16 words, while Trumps are comprised of 10.”

Marta Degani. 2015. Framing the Rhetoric of a Leader. An Analysis of Obama´s Election Campaign Speeches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marta Degani. 2016. Endangered Intellect: A case study of Clinton vs Trump Campaign Discourse. Iperstoria. 8, 131-145. (http://www.iperstoria.it/joomla/images/PDF/Numero_8/generale_8/Degani.pdf)

Der Beitrag Language in politics: Why some act the strict father erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.

Source: AAU TEWI