“Das sind tollwütige Tiere“ (“They are rabid animals”): How metaphors can be used to de-humanise immigrants

Politics, Sociolinguistics

Today’s RDM guest blogger, Hanna Bruns, comes from the University of Bonn, in Germany. Although her data come from a set of German What’sApp Chats, her larger topic (how immigrants are dehumanized through the use of metaphors) is one with much broader international relevance today. RDM is very pleased to be able to share Hanna’s work:

We are all familiar with metaphors. After all, we know that when Robert Burns rhymes about the red red rose, he is talking about love, and that the white whale in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is supposed to represent God, nature, the subconscious, and so on… But metaphors are not only found in poems, literary works and poetic speeches: they are everywhere!

Conceptual Metaphors
In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson introduced a linguistic framework called “conceptual metaphor theory,” which described metaphors as one of “our principal vehicles for understanding” the world around us (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 159). Metaphors facilitate our “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 5). In other words, metaphors are often used to make difficult and abstract concepts (“target domain”) easier to understand by using clearer and easier terms (“source domain”). Take, for example, the metaphor of life is a journey. Since life is a complicated thing which is not so easily grasped (grasp, another metaphor 😉), people try to make it easier by imagining it as a journey, which has a starting point (birth) and an end (death). In fact, this is a very popular conceptual metaphor. You can find it in a lot of contexts, for example when people say you have to move on, or you are on the right path, or that you are lost. So you see, in a way, these conceptual metaphors are made up out of a lot of smaller parts which are all connected to form one big picture. Everybody uses these conceptual metaphors, and there are a lot of them, for all kinds of situations. And metaphors can be powerful, especially because they highlight one specific aspect of the target domain while ignoring other aspects.
Although some metaphors can be helpful as tools for understanding the world around us, there are other metaphors that can be harmful. For instance, metaphors can be used to spread and justify damaging ideas about others, without people even realising this!

My focus in this post is on the metaphors found in xenophobic discourse which are used to talk about immigrants in a negative way. By using specific metaphors to refer to immigrants, immigrants can be portrayed in a very bad way without actively saying that they are “bad.” As one linguist who does research on metaphors says: “Ideological patterns […] arise when text-producers select one set of metaphors instead of alternative ones” (Hart 2010: 127).

A typical conceptual metaphor that is used often in anti-immigrant discourse is that of floods of immigrants. This belongs to the conceptual metaphor of immigration as natural disaster. In this concept, immigrants are portrayed as floods, coming in waves, or as a stream, flowing into the country, and destroying the country. Other popular xenophobic concepts portray immigrants as diseases, which makes the (national) body ill; or as animals and beasts. What all of these metaphors have in common is that they portray the immigrants as not being human, and as dangerous.

The WhatsApp group chat “AfD Info LSA”
In the past few years, the German political party “Alternative für Deutschland” (“Alternative for Germany”, in short “AfD”) has caused a lot of debate in the German political field mostly because of their (for some, not so apparent) xenophobic, nationalistic, and Islamophobic viewpoints. In June 2017, a WhatsApp group chat was leaked with the group name “AfD Info LSA”. In that group, members of the AfD from the state Saxonia-Anhalt discussed several topics.
My home-town is Dresden in Saxonia, where the AfD has a strong influence on people. I have seen how people have changed and have started being mean and openly racist because they felt supported by the opinions expressed by the AfD, so this matter is very personal for me. But I am a scientist too. So instead of basing my opinions about the party solely on my personal feelings, I decided to analyze the language in that leaked WhatsApp chat from June 2017. More specifically, I looked at racist and xenophobic metaphors.

Metaphors found in the AfD chat
I started by looking at what other studies have identified as “typical” racist and xenophobic metaphors. I found a long list of metaphors that were used by the National Socialists. These are summarized in the table below (click on table to enlarge it).

Once I knew what I was looking for, I started reading through the WhatsApp chat and searching for any of these metaphors. Let me give you some examples of what I found (they are, of course, in German, but you can find my English translations below). As you read them, maybe you can think about which category they belong to.

Example 1

06.02.17, 16:02:11: [telephone number]: I know a family in my neighbourhood, there’s a single mother. Her boy is 8 years and is in 2nd grade. He told me that he has never been on holidays. It is disgraceful, when you see these parasites here…

Example 2

17.02.17, 09:36:03: [name of sender]: These people are like water – it always finds a way. And if we don’t close it up quick enough, then we are soon under water (lit. land under)!
17.02.17, 10:05:23: [name of sender]: [Name], the land is already under water and if nothing is done about it, we will drown mercilessly. And a lifeboat is far away.

Example 3
28.02.17, 16:21:08: [name of sender]: I am at the main station in Nuremberg and feel foreign in my own country, there are invaders from Africa or from Arabic countries just everywhere
28.02.17, 16:21:34: [name of sender]: Just saw a grandma who was using the other side of the street just so that she didn’t have to walk straight towards these invaders

These are of course just a few examples, but in my analysis of the chat, I actually found that ALL of the typical racist and xenophobic metaphors were used! The most frequent conceptual metaphor was war and military, where immigrants were, for example, described as invaders of the country. The members of the AfD then described themselves a bastion against the enemies that are attacking the German nation. But, as you can see from the example, immigrants were also described as a flood, that tries to drown the German people – or as parasites feeding on the German people. To see even more kinds of metaphors used in the chat, have a look at the table below (click on the table to enlarge it).


What I have tried to show in this post is that metaphors don’t only exist in poems – they are all around us, and we use them every day. Metaphors can be really useful and cool: especially if you know what you are using them for – as well as if you can recognize how other people are using them. Sometimes, a person’s real message is actually hidden in the metaphors they use. So maybe, the next time you describe one thing in terms of another, take a minute to ask yourself about why you’re saying the things you’re saying, in the specific way that you are saying them – and pay close attention to how other people use metaphors as well. Because HOW people say things is every bit as important and meaningful as WHAT they say.

References

Bruns, H. (2017). „Scheint ein bösartiges Geschwür am Volkskörper zu sein“ – National Socialist metaphors in a WhatsApp group chat of members of the German party Alternative für Deutschland. (unpublished).
Burns, R. (1794). A red red rose. Retrieved from: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43812/a-red-red-rose
Hart, C. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New perspectives on immigration discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Melville, H. (1851). Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Foto (Featured image): Lizard by: Free-Photos
https://pixabay.com/en/lizard-reptile-graffiti-wall-you-1210069/
Foto: Migration by: Capri23auto
https://pixabay.com/en/migration-integration-migrants-3129299/
Foto: Whatsapp-Icon by: geralt
https://pixabay.com/en/whatsapp-icon-communication-social-2317206/

Note: This blog-post is based on my term-paper, which I wrote for my M.A. studies “Applied Linguistics” at the University of Bonn, Germany. Special thanks to my lecturer, Dr. Stefanie Pohle, for her support (regarding this post and everything else).

Podcast about Airbnb Reviews

Business Communication, Reviews and Ratings

A good interview often feels like having a conversation with an old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. A few months ago, I was interviewed by Evan Jordan, a tourism researcher and faculty member at Arizona State University. Evan is the host of the exciting new Trip Doctor Podcast series, which is all about tourism research, and is really intended to help people be more intelligent travelers. Although Evan and I have never met in person, we had a wonderful chat about the passion that we both share for travel, and the specific things that we love about it: like great food, new adventures, and interesting stories! Evan was especially interested in the AirBnB reviews study that my student, Judith Bridges, and I published last year in the journal, Current Issues in Tourism. Our work is featured on Episode 01: Searching for the truth in AirBnB reviews. Check it out on The Trip Doctor website (www.gotripdoctor.com), iTunes (https://apple.co/2t9T3BQ), or Android (https://bit.ly/2lnC0rz)! And I invite you to share your best and worst AirBnB experiences with other RDM readers.

Digital Media as Interactional Resources in the Research Interview

Sociolinguistics

From time to time, I like to share technology-related observations about things that  happen in my classes.  This weekend, as I was grading papers, I was fascinated by a new trend that I’ve observed: interview participants using digital media in various ways while being interviewed.

I am currently teaching my “Cross-Cultural Issues in ESL” course, which is one of the required courses for our Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics.  I teach it every Spring semester.  For one of the course requirements, I’ve developed a multi-phase experiential project that introduces students to different aspects of the ethnographic process.  Each student selects a “New Cultural Experience” (NCE) that they attend as a participant-observer, and then write about the cultural practices they observed.  This is followed by an interview with a member of that particular community.  These interviews enable students to triangulate their outsider (etic) observations with an insider (emic) perspective, in order to better understand some of the tacit cultural meanings.  I ask my students to transcribe those interviews and submit their transcripts to me to receive a grade for this interview assignment.  Interestingly, this year’s interview transcripts had multiple instances of references to various digital tools.

Smartphone homescreen (Unsplash)

For instance, one student who attended a local Thai temple for his NCE, was discussing representations of the Buddha with his interviewee (another university student who is a member of the Thai temple community), and in the middle of the interview his interviewee pulled out his phone to show the student some other images of the Buddha.   Similarly, a different student who attended our university’s Bhangra Team tryouts for her NCE, interviewed a member of the team whose family came from India.  Their interview extended to topics well beyond Bhangra to more personal topics, and at one point in the interview, as he was discussing his travels to India with his family, her interviewee showed her (again, on his phone) an image of the city where his father was born.  (In both cases, neither of my students remarked at all on the images they had been shown by their interlocutor and the conversation just continued on, which tells me that this is a completely normal, taken-for-granted, interactional practice that has been seamlessly integrated into many forms of talk.)  This same interviewee went on to describe how one of the famous temples in India he has visited is known for feeding 100,000 people a day, adding “there’s videos on YouTube about it.”  In this instance, the interviewee’s reference to YouTube serves as a form of evidence and bolsters his claim about a practice that is geographically removed from the current interaction.

I thought to myself: “Ok, these are university students in their 20s who interviewing other so-called ‘millenials.’  It’s really not that surprising that they variously integrate digital technologies into all of their activities – including while they are being interviewed.”  But then I found a few additional intriguing examples.

One of my students selected greyhound racing as her NCE.  After attending the dog races for an afternoon, this student returned to the site to interview the manager of the track.  As their conversation turned to the more sensitive topic of animal welfare, her interviewee (a man in his 40s or 50s) spoke emphatically about how the employees of the track are all dog lovers, telling her that she can even “go on Facebook and look” at all of the posted photos of track employees with dogs .  So here is another instance of an image, or video, posted on social media serving an evidential function.  Both of these examples also reveal something about our contemporary “semiotic ideologies”: that is, if we can point to a YouTube video, or a Facebook photo, about some phenomenon… then it must be true/real.  It seems that these days, we are treating visual images as more trustworthy than language, without very much acknowledgement of the fact that visuals (just like language) are subject to multiple interpretations – as well as to manipulation.

The final example is from an interview where neither participant is a ‘millenial’: in fact, both interviewer and interviewee are retired.  This particular student decided to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends (aka “Quakers”) for his NCE.  As my student asked his interviewee about the historical origins of this community,  his interviewee impressed me with his vast knowledge of early American history.  He supplied numerous details about important 17th century figures and events that were relevant to the discussion.  But when he started to speak about contemporary demographics – that is, the distribution of the Quaker population around the world – he provided a few percentages, ending his response with “It’s available if you Google it.”  And I totally understand this: we tend to treat historical facts as static or “fixed,” whereas current information is less stable, which encourages us to rely less on memorizing such information, knowing that the most current data will surely be available online somewhere.

Although they were completed as part of a class assignment, these transcripts actually shed light on much wider social practices, and specifically, on some of the many ways in which we interweave the “digital” into our “offline” interactions.  These  include using our phones to show images which would take much longer to describe using words; using references to images or videos on social media as forms of “evidence” for the existence of some given phenomenon that is remote from our immediate experience; and relying on online sources for current information rather than committing it to memory.

Gaming TripAdvisor

Business Communication, Reviews and Ratings, Trip Advisor

Although my main project these days is focused on linguistic creativity and humor in social media, I’m still very interested in all things review-related.  My friend Michael just sent me this great link about how a VICE reporter “gamed” TripAdvisor by creating a fake restaurant profile on their website.  Although this was not exactly his intention going into it, in just over 6 months, his fake restaurant (“The Shed at Dulwich” = literally, the garden shed that he lives in) became the highest-ranked restaurant in London!

The article is a highly entertaining read.  Or, if you prefer, you can watch the 18 minute video version available from the same link.  To me, the most clever parts were the restaurant’s “mood”-themed menu, as well his unexpected food-styling reveals (“whipped cream quenelles” made from shaving cream & “scallops” that were actually round white bleach tablets).  As a consumer, I know that I am totally a sucker for exactly these kinds of conceits: sexy food pics and a conceptual menu.  I was especially interested to learn about how TripAdvisor responded (at the end of the article).

And on a different topic, I just remembered a recent conversation I had with business writer, Tara Ramroop.  We talked about how language shapes workplace culture: a very relevant topic, but something that not all businesses think about, or approach very systematically.  You can read more here.

mansplain, mansplaining, mansplained

Creativity, Sociolinguistics

Metapragmatics refers to the phenomenon of language use itself becoming the object of discourse.  As Judith Bridges (a current Ph.D. student in our Linguistics and Applied Language Studies program) has observed, the word “mansplain” is a perfect example of metapragmatics.  When a person says that someone else has “mansplained” a given topic, that speaker is not just providing a neutral account of what happened; instead, s/he is providing a particular interpretation of a prior interaction.

Furthermore, as Judith points out, “mansplain” is an especially interesting example to explore because it sheds light on gender-related norms, dynamics, and expectations in  communicative interactions.  In her article, just published in the journal, Discourse, Context and Media, Judith examines how the various meanings of “mansplain” (and related forms) are constructed and negotiated in a sample of 200 tweets and Facebook posts.

New research on Tumblr

Creativity, Sociolinguistics

In spite of being such a popular (and fascinating!) social media platform, not much academic research has been published about Tumblr.   A recent study suggests that this may be due to some of the following constraints:

“Severe research limitations are caused by the lack of demographic, geo-spatial, and temporal metadata attached to individual posts, the limited API, restricted access to data, and the large amounts of ephemeral posts on the site”

While these are limitations for carrying out certain types of research, they do not pose problems for the textual analysis of linguistic creativity and humor that I’ve been working on recently.  In fact, a former graduate student and I have just published a paper about popular “Chat” posts on Tumblr. Our article is available at Discourse, Context & Media: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695817300326  In it, we illustrate  some of the discourse strategies that Tumblr content creators exploit in order to construct playful and humorous texts.

Growth in research on the language of online reviews!

Business Communication, Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews, Reviews and Ratings, Trip Advisor

Two years ago  I wrote a post about how excited I was to see 2 presentations about online reviews – other than my own – at IPRA (the International Pragmatics Association), the largest international conference about Pragmatics, which is held biennially.  Interest in this topic continues grow as was seen at this year’s IPRA in Belfast, where there were 7 presentations on the topic.  (Incidentally, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland = total playground for sociolinguists!)

My colleague, Tuija Virtanen, and I organized a panel for this year’s IPRA called “Analyzing Prosumer Discourses: Consumer Reviews, Customer Feedback, and other modes of eWOM.”  The panel was international in scope, with speakers from Finland, New Zealand, Italy, Belgium, and the US.  Tuija’s presentation dealt with various ways of conceptualizing the rather abstract notions of responsibility and accountability as they are made relevant in consumer reviews: in her case, in book reviews on Amazon.  Michael Barlow’s corpus study examined differences between hotel reviews written by male and female TripAdvisor reviewers; interestingly, he found virtually no gender-based differences in variables such as word frequencies, review length, lexical variation, as well as the other variables he looked at.  Irene Cenni’s presentation built on her prior work, comparing TripAdvisor reviews written in Dutch, Italian, and English; this time with a particular focus on service encounters.  She had a number of very interesting findings, which she plans to publish soon – stay tuned!  The two remaining presentations (my own, and Maria Rosaria Compagnone’s) looked at businesses’ responses to restaurant reviews.  I focused on features of “linguistic impoliteness” found in restaurants’ responses to 1- and 2-star reviews, posted on both TripAdvisor and Yelp.  I showed examples of restaurant owners firing back defensive-sounding messages, which included features like sarcasm (“So much for knowing your Florida seafood.”), dismissing the reviewer’s comments (“As for the rest of it…whatever”) and excluding the reviewer from future contact (“Hopefully this reviewer will stay true to their word and make this their last visit.”).  I thought these responses were unprofessional…until I saw Maria Rosaria’s data! Maria Rosaria’s Italian restaurant owners posted much more aggressive and hostile responses on TripAdvisor – including one death threat!

Besides our panel, there were 2 additional presentations dealing with online reviews.  One of these was about extreme positivity in Airbnb reviews: the presenter focused on UK data, but the trends were nearly identical to what Judith Bridges and I wrote about in our Airbnb paper, published earlier this year.  The other was a more exploratory study examining differences in Chinese and Anglophone reviews and responses.

The next IPRA will be held in Hong Kong in summer 2019.  Will the number of online review-related studies continue to grow?  I’m looking forward to finding out! 🙂

Pragmatics in the Media!

Politics, Sociolinguistics

It’s not often that stories about pragmatics — and matters of linguistic politeness, especially — make it into the mass media.  However, I just came across this interesting article in the NYT, which reports on a study of major social relevance involving language, race and police interactions.

A group of Stanford social scientists studied recordings from police body cameras, which were made during traffic stops.  Applying well-known models of linguistic politeness (e.g., Brown & Levinson) to transcripts made from these interactions, they then analyzed whether there was any difference in the language officers used with white motorists compared to the language officers used with black motorists.  Specifically, they  focused on “levels of respect,” expressed via a combination of different language features.  I like this figure that the researchers included in their report, which shows how these features were identified and quantified.  As you read this top to bottom, the examples in the figure go from least polite to most polite.  In which of these ways would you prefer to be addressed, if you were to be pulled over by a police officer?  (click on the figure to enlarge it)

The full research article with all the details is available online here.

(Spoiler alert: Yes, they did find differences.  The title of the NYT article kind of gives that away.)

A Few Media Updates

Reviews and Ratings, Sociolinguistics

Just wanted to share a few (unrelated)  items that have captured my attention recently…

  • This surprising story about a Dean at Yale getting suspended from her job over a couple of “insensitive” Yelp reviews. Actually, I am still figuring out what I think about all of this.  (Who found these reviews?  Why were they reported?  Was suspension of employment perhaps an excessive response?)  I DEFINITELY welcome your comments as I try to make sense of this situation myself. (This story was sent to me by former student, Dr. Erhan Aslan – thanks, Erhan!)
  • A super interesting podcast featuring 2 of my favorite “celebrity linguists,” Deborah Tannen and John McWhorter, talking about some of my favorite topics: intercultural communication, interruption, language & gender, and, as most of my former students will likely remember… “complementary schismogenesis”!!! (Thanks to Taylor for the link & thanks to Nathan for the photo!)
  • And I just finished reading this engaging book by Marcel Danesi.

The main points of this book can be boiled down to a few sentences.  Basically, emoji add support to a text: they primarily communicate affective (rather than referential) meaning. In other words, what emoji contribute to a message is more of an emotional nuance than actual content – that is, they help cue readers on how to interpret the main message (just like our intonation, or facial expressions, provide in F2F communication).  The bulk of the message is still realized, by and large, linguistically. One final point: the overwhelming majority of emoji are used to communicate positive feelings, which means that 🙂  is much more common in our communication than 🙁 .  That’s the book in a nutshell.  (However, as an added bonus…for anyone who’s ever wondered about what “semiotics” is all about, this book offers a very friendly and approachable introduction to the topic.)

What goes on in the comments section below parody reviews on Amazon?

Creativity, Parody Reviews

Have you ever wondered about whether or not anyone ever writes anything in that “Comments” section that’s found under each review on Amazon?  As far as most reviews go, I’ve noticed that some readers assign a vote of “helpful” if they like a particular review; however, I’ve also observed that the “Comments” sections usually remain pretty empty.

In the last year or so, I’ve been researching different aspects of parody reviews on Amazon.  And I’ve found that although users don’t typically comment on normal reviews… there are, in contrast, many comments in response to parody reviews of products like the following.

Over the last few weeks, my undergraduate research assistant, Chelsea Lo, and I have been building a data set of comments responding to parody reviews.  Our sample consists of nearly 300 comments responding to reviews written about 6 popularly-parodied products on Amazon.  Chelsea and I have found that the most common types of expressions that appear are ones which show a reader’s appreciation of the review writer’s creativity and cleverness, such as:

BEST. REVIEW. EVER.

or:

I keep coming back to giggle at this post.

or (one of our personal favorites):

I hope you got some college credit for this.

A few even took the form of mock wedding proposals:

Marry me. You are the man?/woman? of my dreams.

The next most common responses are those which pose some kind of a reply that’s directed to the review’s author. Often, these types of responses play along with joke, acting as though they inhabit the same fictional world that’s been created by the parody review writer.  For example, this commenter asks the author of one of the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt parody reviews for more information about the missing ending of the narrative he has crafted:

Hey what’s the end what happened between you and the asthmatic???? Don’t leave us all hanging!!!!! Did you end up ordering the shirt in newborn size? Hmmmmm???

These 2 types of responses account for over 80% of the comments in our sample. The remaining 20% of comments are things like: a reply to another commenter in the same strand  (“I second that impulse to “like.””); stand-alone laughter tokens, for example “LOL!! ” or “BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA“; or random popular culture references, like references to Star Wars, or to lyrics of popular songs.

We found only 2 instances of “policing behavior” (e.g., “Seriously?” , “GROW UP”  ) – and these followed some of the more political parody reviews of Avery Binders, which were associated with Mitt Romney’s now-famous “binders full of women” comment.

By and large then, Chelsea and I conclude that vast majority comments in response to parody reviews on Amazon are favorable, showing affiliation with and appreciation of their authors’ creativity and humor.