[Dgkl] CfP: Theme Session “Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation” (Grammar & Corpora 2027, HHU Düsseldorf)

[Carolin Brandt]

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for our theme session, “Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation,” at the Grammar and Corpora 2027 conference. The conference will take place from June 30 to July 2, 2027, at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.

The full Call for Papers is included below. We invite you to submit an abstract by October 15, 2026, and would appreciate it if you would share this call with interested colleagues and via relevant mailing lists.


Kind regards, 
Dr. Toke Hoffmeister & Carolin Brandt 
Philipps University of Marburg

Call for Papers "Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation" 
Theme Session at Grammar and Corpora 2027 (HHU Düsseldorf, June 30 - July 2, 2027) 
Carolin Brandt (Marburg) & Toke Hoffmeister (Marburg) 

Submission deadline: October 15, 2026 (anywhere on Earth) 

This theme session "Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation" held as part of the conference Grammar and Corpora 2027 in Düsseldorf brings together researchers working on figurative language, corpus annotation, and language acquisition to discuss theoretically informed and methodologically reproducible approaches to the annotation of figurative language. 

Unlike other grammatical phenomena, figurative meaning emerges from the interaction of lexical forms, discourse context, and speakers’ conceptual knowledge. Its annotation requires transparent operationalizations that balance annotation reliability with sensitivity to contextual variation. Thus, figurative language annotation remains a methodological challenge in corpus linguistics. 

These challenges become particularly evident in first and second language acquisition. In these contexts, figurative expressions are often emergent, only partially conventionalized, or shaped by cross-linguistic influence, code-mixing, and multilingual constructional patterns (Endesfelder Quick et al., 2021; Gaskins & Rundblad, 2023). 

First signs of figurative language emerge early in language development, and metaphorical competence constitutes an important component of second language learning (Littlemore et al., 2014; Nacey, 2022). Although established procedures such as MIPVU (Steen et al. 2010) provide a robust foundation for metaphor identification, they often require adaptation to different contexts of use, e.g. to acquisitional and multilingual data. More recently, Gaskins et al. (2023) demonstrated that reliable metaphor annotation is possible when annotation criteria are carefully adapted to naturally occurring child-language data. Other forms of figurative language, however, such as metonymy, remain comparatively underrepresented in current annotation frameworks. 

Therefore, we invite submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following questions: 
- How can corpus-based research contribute to transparent and reproducible annotation guidelines for figurative language? 
- How can ambiguity, borderline cases, and context-dependent figurative meaning be handled systematically in annotation? 
- How should figurativity be operationalized in child-language, learner, and bilingual corpora? 
- Which annotation decisions are particularly sensitive to language development, input frequency, or multilingual language use? 

Our aim is to advance empirically robust annotation practices for figurative language that are applicable across diverse contexts of use. 

Further information on abstract submission is available at: 
https://gac2027.phil.hhu.de/theme-sessions/ 

When submitting via OpenReview, please select "Theme Session Figurative Language Annotation" as the submission category. 


References 
Endesfelder Quick, A., Backus, A., & Lieven, E. (2021). Entrenchment effects in code-mixing: Individual differences in German–English bilingual children. Cognitive Linguistics, 32(2), 319–348. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2020-0036 
Gaskins, D., Falcone, M., & Rundblad, G. (2023). A usage-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis in child speech. Language and Cognition, 16(1), 1–25. 
Gaskins, D., & Rundblad, G. (2023). Metaphor production in the bilingual acquisition of English and Polish. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1162486. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.116248. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1162486 
Littlemore, J., Krennmayr, T., Turnes, J., & Turner, S. (2014). An investigation into metaphor use at different levels of second language writing. Applied Linguistics, 35(2), 117–144. 
Nacey, S. (2022). Development of metaphorical production in learner language: A longitudinal perspective. Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning, 10(2), 272–297. 
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. John Benjamins.