Introduction to corpus session

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Introduction to corpus session

• General corpora
• Rosamund Moon lexicography, polysemy data
• Alice Deignan
• Specialised corpora
• Elena Semino
• Andreas Musolff

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Corpus linguistics

• Seeks to account for all citations (or a large,
  random sample) of a word, including all its
  inflections
• Pays close attention to linguistic form
• (among other principles)

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Some characteristics of corpus research into
metaphor

• Forces difficult decisions
• Static vs dynamic views of language
• Metaphors as part of resources of language

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Problems of categorizing metaphors in corpus data

• Alice Deignan

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Structure

• Methodology for studying metaphors in corpora
  Research Questions
• Distinctions used in classifying corpus data
• Problems

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Methodology

• Studying whole concordance, or large random
  sample, of all inflections of a lexeme
• Identifying literal and metaphorical senses
• Tracing semantic relationships between senses
• Examining linguistic, semantic and pragmatic
  features of both

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Research questions

• Implications for metaphor theory of
• grammatical behaviour of literal and non-literal
  uses
• collocational patterns
• semantic relations between literal and
  non-literal uses
• evaluative meaning of literal and non-literal
  uses.

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Assumptions underlying this methodology

• Linguistic details are important in themselves,
  and as realisations of cognitive processes
• Literal and non-literal meanings can be separated
• Metaphor is the dominant trope
• The word is a valid unit of analysis

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Distinctions used in analysing metaphors using
corpus data

• From applied linguistics word/ collocation/
  idiom
• From semantics semantics/ pragmatics
  denotation/ connotation
• From metaphor theory metaphor/ metonymy/ literal
  use

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Coherence of metaphorical mapping

• creating a more favourable and positive
  environment in which business can flourish.
• Though Ashokas empire fragmented politically
  after his death, the great flowering of Indian
  culture begun in his reign continued
• Lincolns view that slavery would wither and
  die.
• Wild generosity often shrivels up in the cold
  wind of reality.
• The market wilted in line with softer overseas
  bonds.

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A less clearcut case

• Fire/ fires/ fired/ firing
• 12088 citations in 59 million word general
  corpus. Around 16 non-literal.

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Some non-literal uses of fire

• Add fuel to the fire
• Get on like a house on fire
• (be) fired up
• Fire from the hip
• Come under fire
• Get caught in cross-fire
• Fuel the fire

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The Achilles heel of quality the assessment of
student learning

• Achilles heel 41 citations in corpus, 2 of which
  literal
• 885 where heel clearly refers to part of a foot,
  hand, shoe or something shaped like a heel
• 3 which may be metaphorical, where heel refers to
  an unpleasant person

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The remaining 473 citations of heel

• Hard on the heels of
• Well heeled
• Head over heels
• Hot on the heels of
• Achilles heel
• Turn on your heel
• Dig in your heels

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More fixed expressions

• Bring someone to heel
• Kick ones heels
• Snap at someones heels
• Down at heel
• Drag ones heels
• Cool ones heels
• Kick up ones heels
• Be under the heel of someone

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Cline between literal and figurative meaning

• Literal
• her fat insteps leaning over her down at heel
  shoes
• ???
• Watch out for down at heel strangers who want to
  share a room
• Figurative (metaphor from metonymy)
• a tale of love, laziness, lies and lobelia
  amongst the staff of a down at heel gardening
  magazine

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Analysing fixed expressions in terms of CMs

• Heels LIFE IS A JOURNEY? DOWN IS BAD?
• The CM is very partial
• The CM has no predictive power in terms of
  linguistic realisation
• No account for the linguistic fixedness

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Patterns..

• The metaphor/ metonymy split may not fit natural
  language data borderline uses predominate
• Figurative language is very frequently found in
  semi-fixed lexico-grammatical strings
• It is difficult in most cases to assign a
  specific sense- literal or figurative- to many
  lexico-grammatical strings

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In other words..

• A number of distinctions which we often try to
  make seem to break down
• Word/ idiom
• Metaphor/ metonymy
• Literal/ non-literal
• Semantic/ pragmatic meaning
• But these expressions seem to be so common that
  they need to be placed at the centre of enquiry
  rather than seen as atypical, borderline cases.

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Relevant work

• Moon 1998 discoursal and evaluative properties
  of fixed expressions and idioms difficulty of
  distinguishing literal from non-literal uses
• Gibbs 1994, 1999 centrality of metonymy
• Goossens 1995 interactions between metaphor and
  metonymy
• Musolff 2004 metaphor scenarios

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Kovecses, 2005. Metaphor in Culture Universality
and Variation. Cambridge University Press. P. 32

• apparently irregular uses may eventually turn out
  to be systematic when found in large numbers in
  large corpora

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Further research

• How frequent are such fixed figurative
  expressions, as percentages of concordances of a
  word?
• Do non-literal meanings tend to be carried in
  fixed expressions rather than in single words?
• Does metonymy generate multi-word expressions
  while metaphor generates single words?
• Are conventional linguistic metonyms more
  frequent than conventional linguistic metaphors?

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Implications?

• If the answer to the first question is fixed
  figurative expressions are very frequent, and
  the answers to the rest are yes, what are the
  implications for a theory of metaphor?