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Levels of Linguistic Analysis II: Morphology

6 Metaphor

This week we have a brief look at metaphor. When we think of metaphor, we usually have literary metaphor in mind. However, as soon as you try to give a systematic definition of metaphor, you will notice how pervasive the concept is. As a matter of fact, many lexemes have common metaphorical uses and it becomes very difficult to draw the line. One major way that our lexicon is enriched with new meanings and uses of existing lexemes is by metaphorical extension.

Examples:

  1. to light up
  1. Why should he light up his front lamp to time? (BNC)
  2. My eyes light up at the sight of her. (BNC)
  1. ocean
  1. Only a little earthy bank separates me from the edge of the ocean. (BNC)
  2. The smaller yurt was an ocean of coolness and quiet. (BNC)

Sometimes metaphorical uses are correlate with certain lexical and grammatical contexts. light up for example is used metaphorically whenever in the context of face or eyes. The construction [an ocean of x] is almost always used metaphorically to express an extremely large quantity of x. x in this case is itself something resembling a liquid substance only via metaphor. Emotions are often understood as liquids.

6.1 Metaphor and quantitative evidence

6.1.1 Coding

One of the main challenges concerning metaphor in corpus linguistics is that it is hard, and sometimes impossible, to extract metaphorical uses automatically. The following list highlights the major implications of this.

  • Manual coding is time-consuming
  • Manual coding is error prone; requires rigorous operationalization
  • Frequencies of metaphorical uses are often dwarfed by non-metaphorical uses
  • There is often no way to distinguish “literal” and “metaphorical”

6.2 Metaphor and Cognition

Metaphor is not merely a figure of speech that we can use to write nicer poems or prose. It is so fundamental to our perception of our environment that it is in fact our main way to construct non-perceptual information.

6.2.1 Time is space

One of the most pervasive metaphorical patterns in language is that of time as space. You might easily overlook this mapping because understanding temporal relations in the sense of spatial relations is so basic to our cognition that it is easily overlooked. We do not have a physical sense of time. Our eyes provide us with information about space; depth perception allows us to sense differences in distance. We can also directly perceive ourselves relative to the space we move in with a combination of our senses of balance and proprioception. All the information of time is inferred from those more basic senses and the changes we experience. Language use reflects this asymmetry.

Historically most of our temporal function words are etymologically derived from spatial function words or lexemes with a spatial meaning.

  • Prepositions: at, after, before, between …
  • Temporal auxiliaries: going to, be about to, venire de (fr.), voll am Chillen, Digga (ger.) …
  • Temporal adverbs: always, next …
  • Nouns: presence, past …
  • …

6.2.2 Exploring color metaphors

Another common source domain for metaphors is color. I asked you to brainstorm color metaphors and you split up in groups. You found a lot of interesting mappings and linguistic structures representing them. Here are some highlights:

  • Red is danger: red light, red flag, redlining
  • Red associated to communism: red army, red menace

red is also associated to beauty, love and sensuality.

  • Blue is calm: feeling blue, out of the blue,

  • Black is bad: black night, black death, black times

  • Black is obscure, abnormal: black market, black money, black sheep

  • Green is young or unexperienced: green boy, green behind the ears

  • Green as environmentally conscious: green politician, green(er) cars

  • Green is jealous: green with envy

The Yellow group came to the conclusion that yellow seems to be used mostly literally. You hypothesized that the color is more important in Eastern cultures so we could expect to find more collocations and idioms with yellow used metaphorically.

6.3 Homework

6.3.1 Task

This week we will start with some light corpus searches. Make yourself familiar with the cheatsheet (also check out the other resources on the Wiki).

  1. Which are the 10 most frequent prepositions? Make a frequency list of prepositions.
  2. Which are the 10 most frequent colors? Make a frequency list.
  3. Which prepositions of the top 10 have both temporal and spatial uses?
  4. Pick one such preposition, query it, and try to determine whether the spatial or the temporal use is more common.

Note that 1. can be easily done with the help of POS tags, while for 2. you’ll need to find a different approach since words are not annotated for whether they are colors. Exercise 4. is not about being exact. Explore the concordance, get a feeling for the data, try to estimate. Think about how you could distinguish temporal and spatial uses based on surrounding words and structures.

Send me your results as PDF. For the frequency lists, just take the top 10 and put them in tables. The rest can be prose.

6.3.2 Tip of the day

One of the more annoying steps during the data acquisition via our server is getting the concordance or frequency lists to your computer. In the lecture, one rather convenient method was introduced, but you can do even better. You can set up a secure connection via WebDAV, and integrate your server files into your local file browser. If you follow the steps illustrated in the tutorials below, you will have your server space show up in your files as though it was a drive on your computer. This can save you a lot of time and hundreds of clicks.

For general information, click here

BONUS Tip:

You can use your server space to create your own website. So if you’ve played with the thought of setting up your website, this is a convenient way to experiment. Normally, you have to acquire your own domain and server space, but here you can get right to it. Bear in mind that the website you set up there is gonna expire with your uni account. It can be a nice playground, though, for a real future website. Or maybe you want to learn some HTML/CSS or even PHP or Javascript.