Metaphor Analysis - Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities - Lynne Cameron
9: Corpus techniques for metaphor analysis
Metaphor Analysis - Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities - Lynne Cameron
Alice Deignan [+]
University of Leeds
View Website
Elena Semino
Lancaster University
Description
Deignan and Semino illustrate how techniques of corpus linguistics and specially designed software can assist metaphor analysis, enabling larger quantities of data to be processed. A corpus is simply a collection of discourse data, usually large or very large in scale, often with millions of word. Corpus software can carry out automatic and very swift searches for patterns of word use across the corpus. Corpus techniques have much to offer metaphor analysis: from straightforward calculations of word frequency to comparisons of metaphor use in the speech community; from supporting the extraction of implied meanings and cultural connotations of metaphors to automatically identifying semantic groupings.