Metaphoric Structure of ANGER – Developing Usage-Based Methods for Contrastive Linguistics
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Despite the descriptive power of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Kövecses 1986; Lakoff 1987), the analytical framework faces two inherent problems. First, the concepts under examination are treated as discrete “idealised” objects with no means for integrating social variation. Second, the results produced are not readily falsifiable, making it difficult to determine their descriptive validity. This study seeks to adapt the profile-based methodology (Geeraerts et al. 1994, Gries 2003, Glynn & Robinson 2014) for the descriptive analysis of metaphoric structuring. The case study examines the conceptualisation of ANGER in Czech, Polish, and Russian. The method involves three steps. Firstly, inspired by Wierzbicka (1985) and Stefanowistch’s (2006) research, a set of keywords for the concept in question is determined. This is done by calculating the relative frequency of all lexemes broadly designating the concept in question. The resulting proprotional frequency of the lexemes serves as an operationalisation of the concept and a large representative sample can be automatically obtained. The second step involves manually tagging the examples for metaphoric use. Once the metaphoric occurrences of the keywords are identified, a detailed manual feature analysis is performed on the data. The annotation is determined by the nature of the concept in question and the social dimensions relevant to the study. Employing the metadata obtained from the manual analysis, a third step is to map the behavioural profile of the concept using multivariate statistics. At this point, the method follows established procedures in feature analysis, save that instead of producing a behavioural profile of lexemes or constructions, the profile represents the metaphoric structuring of a given target concept. The case study presented here examines the concept of ANGER since it is amongst the most systematically treated in metaphor research. The data are cross-linguistic, permitting the study to test the ability of the method to make cross-cultural generalisations, typical of much research in the metaphor tradition. For practical reasons, only the three most frequent lexemes are considered in this study. Proportional to the frequency of the lexemes, a total of 1000 occurrences for each language will be examined. Pilot studies have shown that approximately one third of the examples reveal metaphoric use, which should produce a sample of approximately 300 occurrences per language. In order to permit cross-linguistic investigation, a comparable corpus has been developed. The corpus is controlled for stylistic and genre effects, consisting exclusively of online personal diaries. This is essential since the Behavioural Profile Approach is sensitive to such extra- linguistic variation. The annotation of the metaphoric examples will be based partially on the annotation employed in Glynn (2015), which examined the non-metaphoric structuring of the concept, and partially on questionnaires developed for the GRID project on cross linguistic emotion research (Fontaine et al. 2013). The study will empirically establish the range of metaphoric structures retrieved via keyword analysis but also determine the behavioural profile for those metaphors. The post hoc statistical analysis will permit a quantified and multidimensional description of the actual use of the metaphors identified. |