A method for linguistic metaphor identification

A method for linguistic metaphor identification: From MIP to MIPVU. By Gerard J. Steen, Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal, Tina Krennmayr, and Trijntje Pasma. (Converging evidence in language and communication research 14.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Pp. xi, 238. ISBN 9789027239037. $135 (Hb).

Reviewed by Svetlana Pashneva, Kursk State University

Metaphors play an increasingly important role in many areas of our everyday life. They can be viewed as the foundation of human knowledge and even as the prism through which we view the world. In this light it is odd that there has been hardly any sustained interest in the methodological aspects of metaphor identification. This problem lies in the centre of mainstream linguistic research, particularly when there is a need for massive annotation of language data in corpora. This book addresses the problem of metaphor identification, presenting an extensive methodological and empirical corpus-linguistic research in two languages, English and Dutch.

The volume consists of eleven chapters. Ch. 1, ‘Linguistic metaphor identification in usage’ (1–24), is introductory. It pres­ents metaphor identification procedure (MIP), developed by the Pragglejaz Group in 2007, as the first explicit and systematic procedure for metaphor identification in language use to have been tested for reliability. MIPVU (VU stands for Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, where the research was carried out) is a refined and extended version of MIP. This chapter sketches the differences between MIP and MIPVU and points out the reasons for developing the latter.

Ch. 2, ‘MIPVU: A manual for identifying metaphor-related words’ (25–42), presents the complete method for the identification of metaphor in language at the level of word use. This chapter gives a detailed set of instructions for linguistic metaphor identification derived from empirical research; this procedure has been applied to about 190,000 words of English discourse and 130,000 words of Dutch discourse.

In Chs. 3–7, the authors demonstrate the method’s application to four different registers in English (news texts, conversations, fiction, and academic texts) and two of the same registers in Dutch (news texts and conversations). In each chapter they offer a combination of general considerations for finding metaphorical language, technical consider­ations of method, and more specific reflections on relations in the particular register. Chs. 8 and 9 are methodological. They evalua­te the MIPVU and present their findings through a series of successful reliability tests reported in statistical detail and a series of post hoc troubleshooting exercises.

Ch. 10 contains some of the main find­ings of the corpus annotations for the English-language project, spelling out how metaphor is distributed across the four registers (conversation, news, fiction, and academic discourse) and the main word classes (adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, determiners, nouns, prepositions, verbs, and the remainder). The final chapter briefly reconsiders the issues raised by MIP and their proposed solutions in MIPVU to show what this type of methodological attention can mean for research and theory.

The method presented in this book is an interesting challenge to the community of linguis­tic metaphor researchers, who are encouraged to be equally explicit and systematic about their procedures of data collection. It can be employed by cognitive linguists, stylisticians, discourse ana­lysts, applied linguists, psycholinguists, and sociolinguists.

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