Re: Corpora: metaphors

Adam Kilgarriff (Adam.Kilgarriff@itri.brighton.ac.uk)
Mon, 11 Oct 1999 07:15:05 +0100

Problem number 1 for "metaphors and corpora" is to work out what a
metaphor is. In particular, half the vocabulary comprises frozen
metaphors like "I see" where "see" is presumably a metaphor for
"understand". But frozen metaphors do not require speaker or hearer
to process the expression in any particular way - the frozen metaphor
is just there, in the lexicon, as a meaning for the word. For many
purposes, the only items which are properly the objects of study for
metaphor research are fresh (non-lexicalised) metaphors.

Identifying (and classifying) non-lexicalised uses of words is not
easy, but is interesting. I've been doing some of it (and am
developing a modest corpus) -- you can find the paper

"Generative lexicon meets corpus data: the case of non-standard word
uses"
To appear in "Word Meaning and Creativity", edited by Pierrette Bouillon
and Frederica Busa, Cambridge University Press.
at

http://www.itri.bton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff/gl2.ps

Best,

Adam

> From: Denis Jamet <denis.jamet@libertysurf.fr>
> To: CORPORA <corpora@hd.uib.no>
> Subject: Corpora: metaphors
> Date: 08 October 1999 04:57
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am currently working on metaphors, and trying to find a way of
> "extracting" metaphors from a corpus. The problem I came across is that
> metaphor, consisting in a semantic shift, shows no formal features (i.e.
> there are no distinctive features between "John is a boy" (literal) and
> "John is a lion" (figurative)). Does anyone know how to retrieve
> metaphors from a corpus ? Or does anyone happen to know a "corpus of
> metaphors" ?
>
> Thanks,
> Denis
>
> Denis Jamet
> Professor of English Linguistics
> Université Jean Moulin - Lyon3

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