37.2636, Confs: Theme Session at Grammar and Corpora 2027: Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation (Germany)

Tue Aug 11 12:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2636. Tue Aug 11 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2636, Confs: Theme Session at Grammar and Corpora 2027: Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation (Germany)

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Date: 10-Aug-2026
From: Carolin Brandt [carolin.brandt at uni-marburg.de]
Subject: Theme Session at Grammar and Corpora 2027: Challenges in Figurative Language Annotation

Theme Session at Grammar and Corpora 2027: Challenges in Figurative
Language Annotation
Theme: Figurative language annotation across diverse contexts of use,
with a focus on child language, learner language, and multilingual
corpora

Date: 30-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Düsseldorf, Germany
Contact: Carolin Brandt
Contact Email: carolin.brandt at uni-marburg.de
Meeting URL: https://gac2027.phil.hhu.de/theme-sessions/

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Pragmatics; Semantics;
Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

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.

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