11: Metaphor

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The ease with which corpora are accessed via word forms is an advantage as long as it is our aim to investigate words, for example with respect to their relationship to other words, to their internal structure or to their distribution across grammatical structures and across texts and language varieties. As we saw in Chapter 8, the difficulty of accessing corpora at levels of linguistic representation other than the word form is problematic where our aim is to investigate grammar in its own right, but since grammatical structures tend to be associated with particular words and/or morphemes, these difficulties can be overcome to some extent.

When it comes to investigating phenomena that are not lexical in nature, the word-based nature of corpora is clearly a disadvantage and it may seem as though there is no alternative to a careful manual search and/or a sophisticated annotation (manual, semi-manual or based on advanced natural-language technology). However, corpus linguists have actually uncovered a number of relationships between words and linguistic phenomena beyond lexicon and grammar without making use of such annotations. In the final chapter of this book, we will discuss a number of case studies of one such phenomenon: metaphor.