Gonna be on my fucking period in Boomtown, souuuunndd thanks Mother Nature: using Twitter to find multimodal creativity and embodied instant metaphors

Abstract

Using social media in linguistic and socio-linguistic research is becoming more prevalent, but how does it compare to other methods? We argue that Twitter has some multimodal advantages including providing cognitive linguistic researchers with multimodal data and also in providing “instant” metaphors that are elicited from very specific contexts and bodily experiences. We first review some cognitive data that summarizes the embodied, online nature of language processing and then we present data from 3 different corpora: a COCA corpus, a laboratory experiment, and a corpus made from Twitter data. These methods are compared and discussed in terms of ease of use and contributions to questions of interest for cognitive linguists. Results show that the twitter data is relatively easy to collect, contains many multimodal data points, and also elicits “instant” metaphors that are difficult to find/elicit using other methods.