Aletta G. Dorst

Metaphor in usage

Abstract This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor.

Personification in discourse: linguistic forms, conceptual structures and communicative functions.

Drawing on examples from a corpus of 14 excerpts from novels, this article aims to present a systematic investigation of the different linguistic forms, conceptual structures and communicative functions of personification in discourse. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and Steen’s five-step procedure (1999, 2009) will be used to present an integral model distinguishing between linguistic, conceptual, and communicative levels of analysis. The influence of linguistic realization, conventionality, deliberateness, metonymy, and stylistic effects will be considered and it will be demonstrated that studying personifications in discourse raises different issues at each level of analysis. As a result, the question whether something should count as a personification may yield a different answer for each level.