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Lakoff and Johnsons 1980 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) based its claim
that metaphor is central to thought on the pervasiveness and conventionality of
metaphor in language. In Lakoff and Johnsons Metaphors We Live By, and in
many subsequent CMT studies, linguistic examples are the main or sole type of
evidence that is provided for the existence of particular conceptual metaphors as
mappings between source and target domains in conceptual structure.
Subsequent developments of CMT, as well as some alternative theoretical
accounts of metaphor in cognition, are also founded, at least in part, on linguistic
2
The CMT account of metaphor has also inspired, more or less directly, a large
amount of research on the frequencies, forms and functions of metaphor in
particular texts, text types or discourses. This kind of work varies in the extent to
which it explicitly contributes to metaphor theory, but is firmly based in the
analysis of language use in context. Here corpus methods tend to play an
important role, often in combination with qualitative analysis, as I show below.
Types of corpora
A wide range of corpora are used by metaphor scholars, depending on the goals
of the research. Some studies make use of large pre-existing general-purpose
corpora, such as the 15-million-word Italian Reference Corpus (Deignan and
Potter 2004), the 100-million-word British National Corpus (e.g. Stefanowitsch
2006b) and the much larger and growing Bank of English Corpus (e.g. Deignan
2005). These studies tend to make or test generalisations about metaphor use in
a whole (national) language, such as British English, or across two languages,
such as English and Italian.
corpus, or, more frequently, construct their own corpus or corpora. Skorczynska
and Deignan (2006) for example, compare the use of metaphor in two specially
constructed corpora of business research articles (e.g. Management Science) and
articles from business periodicals (e.g. The Economist). Demmen et al. (2015)
analyse the use of Violence metaphors in a dedicated corpus of interviews with
and online forum posts by patients with cancer, family carers and healthcare
professionals. Similarly, LHtes (2014) study of the metaphors and narratives
of New Labour in the UK involved the construction of three comparable corpora
of texts produced by different UK political parties, including manifestoes and
leaders speeches. These specially constructed corpora are seldom larger than a
million words, but are nonetheless big enough to allow generalisations for the
relevant text types.
Variation can also be observed in the specific corpus tools that are employed to
find and analyse occurrences of metaphor in corpora of different sizes (see also
Stefanowitsch 2006a: 2-6). In spite of continued progress in automatic metaphor
identification (e.g. Mason 2004, Berber-Sardinha 2010, Neuman et al. 2013),
most corpus-based studies of metaphor involve searching the data for words or
phrases that are likely to be used metaphorically, or to occur in close proximity
to relevant uses of metaphor. Concordancing tools provide each instance of the
search term in the corpus on a separate line, accompanied by the immediately
preceding and following co-text. Some studies involve the concordancing of
expressions that are likely to be used metaphorically at least some of the time in
the data, i.e. vocabulary associated with a particular source domain or vehicle
grouping. Deignan (2005), for example, concordanced animal terms such as
rabbit and squirrel in the Bank of English to study the realisation of the Animal
source domain in English. Semino et al. (2015) concordanced words such as
journey and path in a corpus of online posts by people with cancer, in order to
study the use of Journey metaphors by this particular group of patients.
whether the search term or some surrounding words are in fact used
metaphorically, and second to identify any patterns that are relevant to the goals
of the study. When specialised corpora are used, it is not uncommon for a small
representative sample of the data to be analysed manually for relevant
metaphorical expressions first, and then for those expressions to be
concordanced in the whole corpus (e.g. Charteris-Black 2004).
A few studies also make use of collocation tools for metaphor analysis. The
collocates of a word are words that are used unusually frequently in close
proximity to that word. Collocations can be calculated on the basis of different
measures of statistical significance (see Brezina et al. 2015). LHte (2014), for
example, consider the collocates of the metaphorically used word tough in her
New Labour corpus, in order to see what policy areas and initiatives are
described in these terms in her data (e.g. the New Labour slogans tough on
crime). Semino (2008) considers the collocates of the adjective rich in the British
National Corpus to test Lakoffs (1993) claim that the expression a rich life is
evidence of the existence of a conventional conceptual metaphor A PURPOSEFUL
LIFE IS A BUSINESS.
Having discussed the types of corpora and tools that can be employed for
metaphor analysis, I now turn to the main contributions that this kind of
approach has made to the study of metaphor.
is built), while the plural rocks tends to have a negative meaning (The marriage
has been on the rocks for a while) (Deignan 2005: 158-9). Furthermore, some
Animal metaphors seem to occur only as nouns (e.g. cow as a derogatory term);
others only occur as verbs (e.g. horsing around); yet others occur both as nouns
and verbs, but not necessarily with the same meaning (e.g. racist pigs and pigging
out on food) (Deignan 2005: 153). In German, Boot (boat) and Schiff (ship)
have similar literal meanings but different conventional metaphorical uses: Boot
is used in expressions such as being in the same boat, or to describe a place as
having no space for newcomers; in contrast, Schiff tends to be used as part of
metaphorical descriptions of difficult enterprises (Zinken 2007).
Corpus methods are also contributing to the study of variation in metaphor use
in the history of a language, across languages, and in different types of texts.
Indeed, a large number of studies have used corpus methods to study the forms
and functions of metaphor in different text-types, including news reports (e.g.
Musolff 2004; Koller 2004), political speeches (Charteris-Black 2005), religious
texts (Charteris-Black 2004), and so on. These studies often tend to aim to
answer questions that pertain to those text-types and their contexts of use,
9
business and economics. Skorczynska (2010) similarly found that the metaphors
in a Business English textbook differ considerably, both in kind and frequency,
from those found in a corpus of specialist business articles. These studies have
implications for the choice of teaching materials in English for Specific Purposes,
as well as for a further appreciation of variation in metaphor use depending on
audience and text-type.
A corpus-based study of metaphors for cancer and the end of life at Lancaster
University, in contrast, has implications for communication in healthcare. The
study involved a combination of manual and computer-aided analysis of a 1.5-
million corpus of interviews with and online posts by patients with advanced
cancer, family carers and healthcare professionals. A variety of patterns of
metaphor use were identified by means of a combination of lexical and semantic
concordances. Among other things, the analysis showed differences among
patients and healthcare professionals in the use of Violence metaphors such as
fighting cancer, with patients using them significantly more frequently than
healthcare professionals. The study also showed that, as many have argued (e.g.
Sontag 1979), violence-related metaphors can be detrimental to patients morale
and self-esteem, as when a patient with a terminal diagnosis says I feel such a
failure that I am not winning this battle. However, for a substantial minority of
patients, these metaphors can be empowering, as when a patient says Cancer and
the fighting of it is something to be proud of (see Demmen et al. 2015, Semino et
al. 2015). These findings suggest a degree of individual variation in the use of
metaphor for illness that is relevant to communication training and practice in
healthcare (see Demjn and Semino forthcoming).
Overall, this section has shown the variety of contributions that corpus-based
approaches can make to the understanding of metaphor in language and
cognition. In the next section I provide a more extensive example of corpus-
based analyses of metaphor in relation to physical illness.
Kvecses (2008) discusses the main metaphors used in English to convey pain
experiences, from the perspective of CMT. He observes that pain is
conceptualized metaphorically in terms of its potential causes (Kvecses 2008:
28). More precisely, pain sensations tend to be expressed metonymically or
metaphorically in terms of causes of damage to the body. For example, the
expression a burning pain is used metonymically when the pain is caused by skin
contact with a flame, and metaphorically when the pain does not result from
contact with sources of heat, but can be compared with the sensation caused by
such contact (e.g. a burning pain caused by acidity in the stomach). Kvecses
(2008) proposes a number of specific conceptual metaphors that are all part of
this broad pattern:
PAIN IS A SHARP OBJECT A sharp stab of pain made her sit back down.
PAIN IS A TORMENTING ANIMAL A massive killing pain came over my right eye [...]
I clawed at my head trying to uproot the fiendish talons from their iron
grip.
PAIN IS FIRE Pain is fire that can devour the whole body.
(Kvecses 2008: 28; emphasis in original)
The connection with metonymy emphasizes the main motivation for such
metaphors. The most prototypical and intersubjectively accessible kind of pain
results from damage to bodily tissues, as in the case of cuts, burns, etc. Other
types of more subjective and invisible pain (e.g. migraine) are described
metaphorically in terms of properties or processes that cause damage to the
body (e.g. a splitting headache).
1Collocates of pain were computed on the basis of log-likelihood (Dunning 1993) and within a
window span of one word to the left and one word to the right of the search string.
12
that are included in the McGill Pain Questionnaire are never or seldom used in
the corpus to describe pain sensations (e.g. taut). This may cast some doubts on
the decision to include such expressions in the questionnaire.
2 I am grateful to the UK Trigeminal Neuralgia Association for allowing me access to their online
forum.
13
5. Conclusions
Corpus approaches have made and are continuing to make a variety of important
contributions to the study of metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon.
These contributions involve not just metaphor theory, but also the
understanding of communication in a variety of contexts, as well as practice in
areas such as education and healthcare. The chapter has also shown the
ingenuity and methodological eclecticism involved in corpus-based studies of
metaphors. Researchers do not just use a variety of corpus tool, but do so
creatively, in order to identify the widest possible variety of potential
metaphorical expressions in their data. An initial manual analysis often provides
the springboard for computer-aided analysis. Even more importantly, decisions
about metaphoricity and about the meanings and functions of metaphors in the
data involve detailed qualitative analyses of the output of corpus tools.
Two final points are in order, which I have not been able to do justice to in the
course of the chapter. First, experimental approaches to the study of metaphor
(e.g. Bowdle and Gentner 2005, Casasanto 2008) can benefit from using as
stimulus materials authentic and, ideally, frequent linguistic expressions:
corpora are a potentially useful source of such materials. Second, any large-scale
linguistic investigation will come across metaphorical uses of language.
Therefore, corpus-based studies of language generally can benefit from, or
possibly even require, the findings and insights that are developed by metaphor
scholars. It is no coincidence, for example, that metaphor is the topic of one of
the guides that followed the creation of the first corpus-based dictionary of
English, the Collins Cobuild dictionary (Deignan 1995). No systematic corpus-
based investigation of word meanings and discourse patterns in any language
can avoid dealing with the role of metaphor in the lexicon and in language use.
Future corpus linguistic research on metaphor is likely to involve the use of ever
more sophisticated corpus and computational tools, the analysis of larger and
more varied corpora and further theoretical, analytical and practical advances.
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