Alice Deignan

• University of Leeds

Metaphors are known to present both opportunities and challenges for second language learners, but relatively little is known about learners’ awareness of them. To investigate this, we analyzed 72 argumentative essays written in English by a group of 37 intermediate Chinese university students of English. We identified metaphors using an establishe...

This article introduces and explores the 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis). The corpus is intended to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpo...

The last half century witnessed an upheaval in scientific investigation of human meaning-making and meaning-sharing. Dynamism in Metaphor and Beyond, is offered as a snapshot of the status of this multidisciplinary endeavor—a peak under the umbrella of what Cognitive Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Figurative Language Studies and related fields hav...

Many education professionals in Britain believe that school pupils have difficulty accessing academic texts because of inadequate knowledge of vocabulary. Previous research has suggested that some high frequency words used in non-specialised contexts have academic meanings that can cause problems for school pupils. We take corpus techniques used in...

In this article, we show what insights can be gained by considering the relationship between expert and non-expert texts about scientific topics through the lens of ‘translation’. We focus specifically on the metaphors used to discuss climate change in a range of educational materials and in interviews with secondary school students in the UK. We s...

Metaphor is used for different functions, including supporting the development of new knowledge and theory, communicating this, and persuading or framing its topic. All of these functions have been noted in economics texts. Analyses of popular economics texts have found that the same metaphor vehicles can be exploited in different ways to present d...

Experts are generally agreed that anthropogenic climate change is happening and will increase in severity, but this view is not clearly reflected in more non-specialised texts. Research has shown that school students have limited and sometimes faulty understanding of climate change. Metaphors are used by scientists in developing thought and communi...

This article discusses the use of metaphors and metonyms in texts about climate change in different registers, with a particular focus on the information given to young people, and what they understand about the topic. It begins by considering the role of metaphorical thinking and language in science, and reviews some of the work on scientific meta...

This chapter explores the issues in dealing with figurative language in dictionaries. It uses the understanding of “figurative language” that is generally shared by applied and corpus linguists, as opposed to scholars of poetry and literature. In this understanding, “figurative language” covers all uses that are understood in some way as being an e...

MacArthur questions the use of the “Macmillan Dictionary” in metaphor identification. In this response, I argue that the ideal way of determining basic meaning is by analysis of concordance citations sampled from an appropriate corpus. This is demonstrated using a 1000 word sample of the concordance for say and its inflections, taken from the “Brit...

The recent cognitive view of metaphor has implications for semantic relations between established metaphorical senses of polysemous lexemes. It has been suggested that the relations of synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy holding between literal senses of lexemes may be replicated by their metaphorical senses. In this paper, lexemes with literal senses...

Earlier studies have demonstrated the dynamic properties of metaphor by showing how the meanings and functions of metaphorical expressions can flexibly change and develop within individual texts or discourse events (Cameron, 20118. Cameron , L. 2011. Metaphor and reconciliation: The discourse-dynamics of empathy in post-conflict conversations, Lon...

p align="left">The analysis of corpus data can reveal features of language use not available to unaided intuition. At the detailed level of collocation and lexical grammar, corpus data show features that are apparently specific to literal uses of words and to different types of non-literal uses, such as metaphor and metonymy. These patterns are mai...

Cognitive metaphor theorists have identified a number of mappings that, it has been claimed, are both central to thinking and productive of linguistic metaphors. One of these is UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING. In this article, we re-examine UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING using two sources of naturally occurring data. Our first source is the Oxford English Corpus...

It is timely for researchers to approach metaphor as social and situated, as a matter of language and discourse, and not just as a matter of thought. Over the last twenty five years, scholars have come to appreciate in depth the cognitive, motivated and embodied nature of metaphor, but have tended to background the linguistic form of metaphor and h...

In this paper, I argue that the general notion of an image metaphor, which has been traditionally confined to so-called “one-shot metaphors“, as used in literary and poetic language, could be expanded to describe many expressions that are found in everyday language. Following Caballero (2003a), I argue that the division in cognitive linguistics of...

This article presents an explicit method that can be reliably employed to identify metaphorically used words in discourse. Our aim is to provide metaphor scholars with a tool that may be flexibly applied to many research contexts. We present the “metaphor identification procedure” (MIP), followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to...

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted corpu...

The findings described in this article suggest that writers' choices of linguistic meta-phors are importantly influenced by 2 factors: the text's intended readership and its purpose. We describe a corpus comparison of metaphor use in scientific and popular business discourse. Frequency measures and concordancing techniques were used to identify the...

Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that many metaphors have an experiential basis that can be interpreted as metonymic. This has led to the current widely held view that metonymy and metaphor overlap and interact with each other, rather than being opposed, as previously believed. Writers such as Louis Goossens have traced different ways in which the...

A powerful claim of conceptual metaphor theory is that the most central metaphors are grounded in bodily experience. It might be expected that these metaphors would be shared by different languages. In this paper, we use large computerised corpora of English and Italian to examine the power of conceptual metaphor theory to explain the non-literal s...

Lakoff (1993) argued that basic level conceptual metaphors are grounded in human experience, and are therefore likely to be found widely across different languages and cultures. However, other mappings may not be shared. It is well documented that many metaphorical expressions vary across languages, and a number of researchers have argued cultural...

We studied metaphorical language in spoken discourse from a number of settings to explore the words and expressions that regularly appear in the cotext of both conventional and innovative metaphors. We found that expressions that we call "tuning devices" are frequent in all the data consulted. Tuning devices have a number of different functions, cl...

Research into metaphor has become one of the fastest-growing and important areas of language research over the past twenty years, and metaphor is now recognized as central to language and language use. The implications of these findings are only just beginning to be felt in applied linguistics and this is designed to convey the excitement of metaph...

The description of linguistic metaphors has often been restricted to intuitively generated examples or the analysis of short texts. The development of large corpora of computer-searchable nonliterary texts enables researchers to make more accurate statements about the use of linguistic metaphors. In the studies described in this article, a computer...

Now that metaphor is recognized as being pervasive in language, it is argued that more attention should be given to the teaching of strategies for comprehending and generating metaphors in L2. In this article we report on a translation exercise undertaken by advanced Polish learners of English which revealed ways in which metaphorical expressions v...

It has become increasingly clear that metaphor needs to be explored in terms of the social and discourse context in which it is used, especially where the aim is to address real-world problems. The notion of 'real world' metaphor research has been developed to describe this important area of investigation. This book starts by describing the nature...