Description
Applying the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP/MIPVU) (PragglejazGroup, 2007; Steen, et al., 2010) to a large corpus of authentic discourse has shown that MIP/MIVU is generally straightforward in its application and produces reliable results (Dorst, 2011; Krennmayr, 2011). However, when several annotators are involved in the identification process, additional guidelines and general rules should sometimes be formulated to ensure consistency among annotators. During the identification process of our project, a limited set of lexical units were identified that caused systematic annotation difficulties. In most cases, the difficulty lay in deciding what should count as the basic meaning of the unit in question.In this paper, we will elaborate on some of these problematic lexical units and the semantic fields they relate to. MIP/MIPVU starts from the notion of embodiment, thereby favouring a human-oriented approach suggesting as a general rule that human senses should be preferred over non-human senses as basic meanings. However, senses from a number of other semantic fields also appear to be prime candidates for basic meanings, thus competing with the human senses. The tensions we will focus on are humans vs chemical processes (e.g. ‘treat’, ‘react’), humans vs colours (e.g. ‘bold’, ‘sombre’) and humans vs sharp objects (e.g. ‘blunt’, ‘keen’). The examples will be considered from the point of view of etymology, contemporary usage and usage in context.
This exercise will show to what extent it is possible to formulate general mapping rules that can serve as guidelines during annotation. These rules are essential in large-scale projects and can be seen as a first step towards automated metaphor detection (Berber Sardinha, 2007, 2010), though the role of the human annotator should not be underestimated. Our aim is to provide new insights into some of the difficulties that large-scale and computational approaches to metaphor may encounter.
| Period | 6 Jul 2012 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 9th Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference |
| Event type | Conference |