Dr. Elise Stickles

Biography

Elise Stickles studies spoken and signed language from a perspective informed by 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, examining how linguistic and gestural content understand interaction and how perception of spatial influences language. Her work reflects and construes how individuals think about spatial relationships and events. Stickles employs a variety of research methods, including experimental and computational techniques as well as corpus-based approaches. Major research projects include MetaNet, which utilizes a 'big data' approach to identify and analyze metaphoric language in large text corpora, and Multimodal Embodied Construction Grammar, a theoretical framework that seeks to incorporate gestural and non-verbal communicative content into the representation of linguistic form and meaning.

Research Interests