11.1: Studying metaphor in corpora
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Metaphor is traditionally defined as the transfer of a word from one referent (variously called vehicle, figure or source) to another (the tenor, ground or target) (cf. e.g. Aristotle, Poetics , XXI). If metaphor were indeed located at the word level, it should be straightforwardly amenable to corpus-linguistic analysis. Unfortunately, things are slightly more complicated. First, the transfer does not typically concern individual words but entire semantic fields (or even conceptual domains, according to some theories). Second, as discussed in some detail in Chapter 4, there is nothing in the word itself that distinguishes its literal and metaphorical uses. One way around this problem is manual annotation, and there are very detailed and sophisticated proposals for annotation procedures (most notably the Pragglejaz Metaphor Identification Procedure, cf., for example, Steen et al. 2010).
However, as stressed in various places throughout this book, the manual annotation of corpora severely limits the amount of data that can be included in a research design; this does not invalidate manual annotation, but it makes alternatives highly desirable. Two broad alternatives have been proposed in corpus linguistics. Since these were discussed in some detail in Chapter 4, we will only repeat them briefly here before illustrating them in more detail in the case studies.