Matteo Fuoli

What an absolute treat and honor to be invited to give a plenary at my favourite conference! 🤩 Thanks so much @gavinbrookes.bsky.social and all the #CADS2026 organizers for this invite. Can't wait!

Try plopping your code into ChatGPT and asking it how you'd like the labels to change!

p.s.: the production team (not me - I promise!) swapped the captions for figures 1 and 2 🥴

It was super fun to work on this paper with brilliant Samantha Ford! Incidentally, this paper has been in the works for almost 10 years - I first presented it at RaAM back in 2016! It’s not procrastination, it’s letting the ideas *marinate* 😅

Our paper connects with several areas of research in discourse studies and cognitive linguistics, including topics like "metaphor resistance", visual and multimodal metaphor, creativity, multimodal argumentation, blaming and protest discourses.

With tools like image editing and generative AI, digital activism is rapidly evolving. Subverting visual and verbal texts is now more accessible than ever, offering new creative ways to expose injustice and advocate for change.

We go beyond metaphors, examining how metonymy, irony, hyperbole, and more can be wielded as tools for resistance. These tropes, combined with visuals, create nuanced counterarguments that resonate emotionally.

Our typology can be used to analyze other forms of figurative subversion, including political cartoons, street art (e.g. Banksy), contemporary conceptual art, memes, protest signs at political rallies, mockumentaries, and mash-up video clips circulated on social media.

We identify four key figurative subversion strategies, which can be used individually or in combination to build a persuasive visual/multimodal argument.

Figurative extension
Figurative layering
Figurative replacement
Verbal reframing

We look at Greenpeace's 2010 "Behind the Logo" campaign, where activists cleverly reworked BP’s logo to call out its "green" branding, as a case study on how people can use figurative and visual strategies to subvert corporate messaging.

What happens when activists creatively reimagine corporate logos to resist branding narratives?

Our new paper explores the powerful multimodal practice of "figurative subversion" and its role in challenging corporate messages.

Read it here: bit.ly/3GrXAse

Join us for our #CCRSS25 corpus linguistics summer school! It's going to be super fun! I'll be giving a session on corpus annotation with the UAM tool.

Job Vacancy at Aston University: Research Assistant The Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics is the leading hub for forensic linguistics worldwide. Set up as the Centre for Forensic Linguistics in 2008 by Malcolm Coulthard, it was expanded into a r...

📢 Come work with us 📢
We're recruiting a new Research Assistant to work alongside @drniccimacleod.bsky.social on her project Talking Rape: Operation Soteria and the Police Interview, funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship 👇
jobs.aston.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2025 Our Corpus Linguistics summer school is open to undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students, as well as researchers who want to improve their skills to apply corpus methods in their own researc...

As we look ahead to the upcoming Corpus Linguistics Summer School (#CCRSS25, 7–11 July), we’ll be spotlighting our fantastic instructors and the sessions they’ll be leading. There’s still time to register—don’t miss out!
www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edac...

Veracity and register in fake news analysis This article addresses two fundamental methodological challenges in linguistic fake news research: how to reliably classify news texts as real versus fake and how to control for register variation whe...

Can we infer deceptive intent from fact-checker labels? And what if what fact-checkers consider “false” today turns out to be “true” tomorrow?

We explore these and other methodological questions in our new paper with Bashayer Baissa & @jwgrieve.bsky.social:

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

YouTube video by ENGL PolyU Seminar | Trading trust: verbal manipulation in the Enron Tapes

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to share my latest research on the language of trust at Hong Kong's Poly.

The study’s in press with Cambridge Elements in Forensic Linguistics and we’re releasing a new 400k corpus of Enron trader phone calls.

Watch this space!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx7_...

Next Monday I’ll be giving a talk on my latest research on the linguistics of trust and manipulation as part of Hong Kong Poly’s English and Communication seminar series.

The talk will be on Zoom and open to all. If you’re interested, you can sign up via the link below!

Our position paper on the sociolinguistic foundations of language modeling is out now in Frontiers in AI!

www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

We argue that sociolinguistics holds the key to understanding and improving large language models.

Great to be part of this special issue on corpus approaches to business communication! Thanks for all your work @mathewgillings.bsky.social and @susannekopf.bsky.social and congrats to all the authors.

Here are a couple of papers that showcase this mixed-methods approach:

bit.ly/3Os4SMZ
bit.ly/4g8bQm2

Thoughts or feedback are welcome!

DISCORE Speaker Series: Dr.Matteo Fuoli - Presentation Dr.Matteo Fuoli gave a talk titled A new methodological synergy? Combining CADS and experimental methods to investigate discourse effects.

First post on Bluesky! 🥳

Here's the recording of a talk I presented a few months ago, hosted by the fantastic team at @discore.bsky.social.

bit.ly/3B9IBQX

Corpus methods have transformed discourse analysis. Here, I argue it's time to take #CADS a step further by combining it with experiments.

Hi Bluesky: the department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham is now on Bluesky! Who else from our department is here? @jeannettel.bsky.social @matteofuoli.bsky.social @adamcschembri.bsky.social @bodowinter.bsky.social @gregwoodin.bsky.social

Hiya! Just joined the platform - would be great if you could add me to this list! Thanks 🙏🏼

Hi Mark! Thanks for creating this list! Do you mind adding me? Thx