Reviewed by Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University
This book is a collection of twelve articles. The first article, by Anatol Stefanowitsch (1–16), focuses on some methodological problems of corpus-based research into metaphor and metonymy from both the linguistic and cognitive perspectives. Stefanowitsch describes the field as ‘still very much in its initial stages’ (12).
In ‘Metaphoricity is gradable’ (17–35), Patrick Hanks extends the idea that ‘metaphor depends on “resonance” between at least two concepts’ (31). In cases in which the resonance gets amplified, some metaphors become more metaphorical than others ‘when two concepts share fewer semantic properties’ (31).
Elena Semino’s ‘A corpus-based study of metaphor for speech activity in British English’ (36–62) is filled with new ideas, although Semino draws heavily on previous celebrated work outside the field of corpora studies. Based on a corpus of more than a quarter-of-a-million words, this study goes beyond the now classical conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT is WAR (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999) and Michael Reddy’s (1979) CONDUIT metaphor.
Stefanowitsch’s second contribution, ‘Words and their metaphors: A corpus-based approach’ (63–105), is undoubtedly challenging. Set against the George Lakoffian tradition and Kövecses (1990), Stefanowitsch examines five basic universal emotions (i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) using metaphorical pattern analysis (MPA). Being committed ‘to quantification and exhaustive data extraction’ (66), MPA is demonstrated to be superior to introspective frameworks.
In ‘The grammar of linguistic metaphors’ (106–22), Alice Deignan suggests that data-driven approaches should be balanced with theory-driven methods to conceptual metaphors. Deignan argues that theory-driven methods ‘can allow linguistic patterns to be ignored, possibly at the expense of useful insights’ (121).
Similar to the preceding papers, Martin Hilpert’s ‘Keeping an eye on the data: Metonymies and their patterns’ (123–51) strongly recommends a data-driven approach over intuitive methods. Looking into a ten-million word selection from the British National Corpus (BNC), Hilpert uncovered 909 usages of eye, of which almost half are metonymic or metaphoric. He claims that ‘metonymic expressions like “under the eye of NP [noun phrase]” have entered the lexicon as constructions and are thus a matter of semantics’ (147) rather than of pragmatics.
In ‘Metonymic proper names: A corpus-based account’ (152–74), Katja Markert and Malvina Nissim discuss their study of four-thousand annotated occurrences of location and organization names extracted from the BNC. Their framework is based on seven principles designed to account for conventional and unconventional metonymic patterns as well as literal and mixed readings. Through experimentation, Markert and Nissim discovered that the reliability of their annotation scheme is exceptionally high (169).
Kathryn Allan’s article, ‘On groutnolls and nog-heads: A case study of the interaction between culture and cognition in intelligence metaphors’ (175–90), is a diachronic corpus-based study that links intelligence and density as expressed by the conceptual metaphor STUPIDITY is CLOSE TEXTURE. Investigating Old English through to present-day English, Allan notes that STUPIDITY is associated with the source domains WOOD, FOOD, EARTH as well as a few other substances.
‘Sense and sensibility: Rational thought versus emotion in metaphorical language’ (191–213), coauthored by Paivi Koivisto and Heli Tissari, is a historical study that compares metaphors associated with the English words mind, reason, wit, love, and fear as used in Early-Modern and present-day English. The authors claim that ‘cultural change is reflected in cognitive metaphors’ (210).
James H. Martin’s article, ‘A corpus-based analysis of context effects on metaphor comprehension’ (214–36), is an examination of the facilitation and inhibition effects observed in laboratory subjects. His experiments demonstrate that ‘recognition time was shorter with metaphorical context, longer with relevant literal target contexts, and much longer still with literal source contexts’ (225).
Veronika Koller, ‘Of critical importance: Using electronic text corpora to study metaphor in business media discourse’ (237–66), uses texts published between 1996–2001 from Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and the Financial Times to compare metaphoric expressions in marketing and sales corpora with mergers and acquisition corpora. Koller focuses on ‘the socio-cultural and ideological aspects of metaphor usage’ (238).
Finally, Alan Partington, ‘Metaphors, motifs and similes across discourse types: Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) at work’ (267–304), observes that (i) ‘the presence of certain prepositions and adverbs can be indicative of metaphors specific to a certain discourse type’ (275); (ii) ‘some discourse types are more dense in metaphor than others’ (293); (iii) ‘familiarity automatically reduces the cognitive distance of juxtaposition’ (296); and (iv) the difference between similes and metaphors is in whether scalar functionality is intended or inferred.
Disregarding dozens of typos, this book will be valuable for cognitive or corpus-oriented figurative language students and researchers.
References
Kövecses, Zoltán. 1990. Emotion concepts. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books.
Reddy, Michael. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. Metaphor and thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony, 284–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.