14/03/23 - Sarah Schwarzenberg (University of Hamburg)

Sarah Schwarzenberg is a PhD Candidate at the University of Hamburg.

 

Abstract: Identifying metaphors in German Sign Language (DGS) in a corpus Metaphors have been and still are of great interest to linguists and are investigated in a myriad of studies. In spite of the theoretical interest, research on and documentation of the actual identification of metaphors is comparatively scarce – both in sign and spoken languages. In our research project “Iconic metaphors and the gesture-sign interface in German Sign Language – corpus data meet experiments (IMaGeS)” we therefore aim at identifying metaphorical signs in German Sign Language (DGS) in the semantic domains cognition and visual perception by
revising and adapting established identification procedures of metaphors.
In this presentation, I discuss our identification procedure of metaphorical signs using examples from the semantic domain cognition. I present two different approaches on how to obtain data and then walk you through possible metaphor analysis steps to further understand the linguistic formation and the special features of metaphorical signs.
With our research, we contribute to the strategies of detecting and understanding of metaphors in DGS.