Dia: Thursday, 04 June, 2026 

Hora: 14.00 h 

Lloc: Sala 52.701, Campus Poblenou 

Link: https://upf-edu.zoom.us/j/94925202960 

Resum:
In this talk, I present my PhD project (work in progress), which is part of a broader research agenda on linguistic creativity in communication. My PhD project focuses on semantically creative expressions, in particular metaphors and similes, in a corpus of doctor–patient interactions involving adolescents and children experiencing seizures for the first time. The aim of the project is to investigate both the production and comprehension of these expressions. In the first part of the talk, I present a classification of semantically creative expressions according to their source domains and examine whether there is an association between source domain and novelty. In particular, I investigate whether certain source domains are more likely to be associated with novel expressions, while others tend to be used in more conventionalised ways. In the second part, I focus on the comprehension and interpretation of these expressions in interaction. I examine how interlocutors respond to semantically creative expressions and how meaning is negotiated step-by-step in interaction, particularly in cases of high novelty where understanding is not immediately shared. A key concept in this analysis is the negotiation of common ground. I present a formal linguistic modelling of one conversation from the corpus by applying an extended version of the discourse model proposed by Farkas and Bruce (2010).