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.

Selected Publications

Sweetser, Eve, David, Oana, & Stickles, Elise. (2019). MetaNet: Automated metaphor identification across languages and domains. In M. Bolognesi, M. Brdar, & K. S. Despot (Eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in the Digital Age: Theory and methods for building repositories of figurative language, pp. 23-47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Stickles, Elise, & Lewis, Tasha N. (2018). Wednesday’s meeting really is on Friday: A meta-analysis and evaluation of ambiguous spatiotemporal language. Cognitive Science 42(3), 1015-1025. doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12559

Lewis, Tasha N., & Stickles, Elise. (2017). Gestural modality and addressee perspective influence how we reason about time. Cognitive Linguistics 28(1), 45-76. doi.org/10.1515/cog-2015-0137

Stickles, Elise, Dodge, Ellen, David, Oana, & Hong, Jisup. (2016). Formalizing contemporary conceptual metaphor theory: A structured repository for metaphor analysis. Constructions and Frames 8(2), 166-213. doi.org/10.1075/cf.8.2.03sti

David, Oana, Lakoff, George, & Stickles, Elise. (2016). Cascades in metaphor and grammar: A case study of metaphors in the gun debate. Constructions and Frames 8(2), 214-253. doi.org/10.1075/cf.8.2.04dav

Dodge, Ellen, Hong, Jisup, & Stickles, Elise.  (2015). MetaNet: Deep semantic automatic metaphor analysis. In E. Shutova, B. B. Klebanov, & P. Lichtenstein (eds.), Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2015 3rd Workshop on Metaphor in NLP (pp. 40-49).