Wednesday Apr 01, 2026

Metaphor with Professor Veronika Koller

In this episode, I talk with Professor Veronica Koller about her CDA-related research across corporate and workplace discourse, language/gender/sexuality, political discourse, and metaphor.

Veronica explains metaphor as talking about one thing in terms of another and shows how metaphors shape experience and do ideological work (e.g., illness as battle/journey; migration as viruses/tsunamis). We discuss metaphor clusters and mixed metaphors. We hear examples from current and recent projects, including the MANTRaP project (Misogyny and the Red Pill) on online misogyny, and Voices of Supporters, which analyses social media comments around European populist parties.

In the subscriber edition, we briefly discuss scaling metaphor analysis with corpus methods, emerging work on metaphors and large language models, and developing research projects.

00:00 Welcome and Introductions

00:48 Research Themes Overview

02:07 Current Projects and Data

03:40 What Metaphor Means

06:41 Why We Use Metaphors

08:12 Ideology and Power Effects

09:40 Metaphor Clusters and Mixing

12:52 Critical Metaphor Analysis

15:27 Identifying Metaphors Systematically

21:18 Worked Example Leadership and Space

26:48 Metaphors That Disguise Vagueness

28:16 Using Metaphor in Research Projects