Bodo Winter

Featured Speaker
International Conference 2017
 

The Sweet Stink of Language: The Sensory Structure of the English Lexicon

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Humans perceive the world through their senses and then share their perceptions with others, chiefly through language. The interconnection between language and perception is key to understanding how we can coordinate with others in a perceptual world. Despite the importance of the senses, several branches of mainstream linguistics have largely disregarded them so far. In my talk, I will discuss new research investigating the sensory vocabulary of English. How many words are there for visual concepts (bright, shiny, blue) compared to smell concepts (fragrant, musky, rancid)? How are such perceptual words used in metaphor (she is a bright researcher with a sharp mind)? And how can we explain the fact that many sound concepts have onomatopoetic character (squealing, beeping)? I will present a series of results highlighting that language is deeply infused with the senses, all the way from metaphor to sound structure.

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Invited Second Session

A Manifesto for a Reproducible Open Linguistics

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Currently, the field of psychology is undergoing what some call “the replicability crisis” – several key findings that have led to policy decisions and practical application turned out to be standing on flimsy empirical evidence. Linguistics is not immune to this crisis. Besides a lack of replicability, there is a lack of openness: journals are filled with useful data and analysis methods that are inaccessible to people from outside academia. In my talk, I will present several key measures that need to be taken to make linguistic research more reproducible and linguistic findings and data more accessible. I will introduce the audience to the wealth of “norms” (ratings of words, such as a word’s emotional valence) and other datasets that are freely available (see languagegoldmine.com) and that can be incorporated into classroom practice. I will conclude that scientific practice in linguistics needs to change to narrow the gap between theory and application.

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Biographical Sketch

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Dr. Bodo Winter is a lecturer in cognitive linguistics at the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, UK. He has received his MA in general linguistics from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and his PhD in cognitive and information sciences from the University of California, Merced. Dr. Winter has also been a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and is an editor of the journal Language & Cognition, as well as a Mercator Fellow of the University of Cologne, Germany. His research combines corpus approaches with experimental methods to study the interconnection between language and perception. Dr. Winter has worked on a wide range of topics, including metaphor, sound symbolism, nonverbal politeness in Korean, and gesture. At the University of Birmingham, Dr. Winter is also teaching for the distance and campus-based MA programs in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. For more information about the program please visit: Here.

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Bodo Winter Media Online

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Introductory Video: Meet Dr. Winter (at bottom of this page)

KOTESOL TEC Interview with Bodo Winter
(PDF attached at bottom of this page.)

Exemplary Research Papers
 ㅡ Taste and Smell Words...
http://bodowinter.com/papers/winter_2016_taste_smell_words.pdf
 ㅡ Iconicity in the Speech of Children and Adults
http://bodowinter.com/papers/Perry_et_al-2017-Developmental_Science.pdf

Personal Website: www.bodowinter.com

Twitter: @BodoWinter

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Bodo Winter's participation in the Korea TESOLㅡPAC 2017 International Conference is sponsored by the University of Birmingham.

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Return to the list of Major Speakers at the Korea TESOLㅡPAC 2017 International Conference.

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Meet Dr. Winter Video