Elise Stickles
Assistant Professor
English Language & Literatures
Faculty of Arts
Research Themes: The Communicating Mind and Body
Elise Stickles studies spoken and signed language from the perspective of cognitive semantics.
Her research lies at the intersection of conceptual metaphor theory and embodied construction grammar approaches to syntax and lexical semantics. She focuses particularly on multimodal metaphoric constructions, comprising both linguistic and gestural content, in order to understand how our interaction with and perception of space influences our language, and in turn how our language use reflects and construes how we think about spatial relationships and events. She makes use of a variety of research methods including experimental and computational, corpus-based approaches.
Her major research projects include MetaNet, a “big data” approach to identifying and analyzing metaphoric language in large text corpora, and Multimodal Embodied Construction Grammar, a theoretical framework for incorporating gestural and other non-verbal communicative content into the representation of linguistic form and meaning.
