Dr Yufeng Liu
Senior Research Associate - Metaphor AnalysisResearch Overview
I am interested in interdisciplinary studies that regard language as a form of social interaction or simply, as a research tool for different purposes in social science. In my PhD project, I investigated metaphorical framing and stance evaluation in translations of Covid news reports across China, the USA, and the UK. I am familiar with corpus methods, discourse analysis, and other types of data analytics, but I prefer a "toolkit" approach in my study, thereby trying to avoid a paradigmatic view of methodologies in favor of a more eclectic approach that selects methods to suit the matter under investigation.
I also touch upon multimodality of metaphors, cognitive translation studies and health communication.
My Role
I am now a senior research associate on the 4D PICTURE project (https://4dpicture.eu/). This project, funded by the EU Horizon with a budget of nine million euros across sixteen partners, aims to transform health care decision-making in oncology by integrating evidence-based decision-support tools and redesigning patients’ care paths using the MetroMapping service design methodology.
The Lancaster team (https://4dpicture.eu/teams/lancaster-university/) will be leading a work package to develop a conversation tool for cancer patients, their significant others, their clinicians and citizens based on the analysis of patient experience data and citizen science methods. This tool builds on the team’s previous work on the Metaphor Menu for People Living with Cancer and the Metaphor in End of Life Care project. My primary role in the project involves analysing metaphors for cancer in English and sharing expertise with colleagues working on other languages (Dutch, Danish and Spanish). I will be working closely with Professor Elena Semino, Professor Paul Rayson (School of Computing and Communications), and Professor Sheila Payne (International Observatory on End-of-Life Care).