Tina Krennmayr

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.

What Corpus Linguistics Can Tell Us About Metaphor Use In Newspaper Texts

Metaphor is part and parcel of everyday language use, including news texts. To date, metaphors in newspapers have been examined mainly for their rhetorical or ideological power. But are metaphors really ubiquitous in news writing? And what is typical of metaphor use in newspapers compared to other kinds of discourse? A corpus-analytic approach can help answer these questions by revealing patterns of metaphor use in newspaper texts. This paper presents a corpus-linguistic quantitative analysis of metaphors in a set of British newspapers. In order to reveal what is typical of metaphor in newspapers, the dataset is compared to three other categories of discourse, namely academic texts, fiction, and conversation.

How Basic Is “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING” When Reasoning About Knowledge? Asymmetric Uses of Sight Metaphors in Office Hours Consultations in English as Academic Lingua Franca

Twenty-seven semi-guided conversations between lecturers and Spanish-speaking undergraduate students were recorded at five different universities in Europe where English is the medium of instruction. Examination of the metaphorical language used in these conversations revealed that SIGHT plays an important role in academic mentoring in English. Lecturers often frame their advice to undergraduate students in terms of what has been called “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING,” on the face of it a somewhat unsurprising finding. If one takes it that the correlation between mental and visual activity is somehow “primary” (Grady, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Sweetser, 1991) then this way of reasoning about learning and knowledge should be common ground in conversations between English- and Spanish-speaking interlocutors. However, we found no such alignment between the two groups of participants in an academic setting. The Spanish speakers not only used words and terms associated with vision significantly less frequently than their English-speaking interlocutors, but also with different meanings. We explore these quantitative and qualitative differences in metaphorical uses of three of the terms used by all participants to talk about learning—see, look and focus—and conclude that, although the “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING” mapping might be available as a way of reasoning about learning and knowledge to people from different cultures, discourse practices influences how salient it is for different groups of speakers. In this regard, it appears to be culturally salient for English-speaking academics, but not necessarily so for speakers of other languages.

VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus

The VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus consists of manual annotations of metaphors in four different registers—news texts, fiction, academic texts, and conversations. The goal of building this corpus was to investigate which metaphors are used in which forms, in which discourse contexts, in which registers, and for which purposes. This chapter reports on the development of the annotation scheme and its physical representation, describes the annotation process, and reports on inter-annotator agreement and quality control as well as current usage of the corpus. It also includes some quantitative results on the interaction between metaphor, register, and word class.