TY - JOUR
T1 - Metaphor in communication
T2 - The distribution of potentially deliberate metaphor across register and word class
AU - Reijnierse, W. Gudrun
AU - Burgers, Christian
AU - Krennmayr, Tina
AU - Steen, Gerard J.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - There is renewed interest in the special role that metaphor can have in its communicative status as metaphor between language users. This paper investigates the occurrence of such deliberate metaphors in comparison with non-deliberate metaphors. To this end, a corpus of 24,762 metaphors was analysed for the presence of potentially deliberate (versus non-deliberate) metaphor use across registers and word classes. Results show that 4.36 percent of metaphors in the corpus are identified as potentially deliberate metaphors. News and fiction contain significantly more potentially deliberate metaphors, while academic texts and conversations exhibit significantly fewer potentially deliberate metaphors than expected. Moreover, nouns and adjectives are used relatively more frequently as potentially deliberate metaphors, while adverbs, verbs and prepositions are used relatively less frequently as potentially deliberate metaphors. These results can be explained by referring to the overall communicative properties of the registers concerned, as well as to the role of the different word classes in those registers.
AB - There is renewed interest in the special role that metaphor can have in its communicative status as metaphor between language users. This paper investigates the occurrence of such deliberate metaphors in comparison with non-deliberate metaphors. To this end, a corpus of 24,762 metaphors was analysed for the presence of potentially deliberate (versus non-deliberate) metaphor use across registers and word classes. Results show that 4.36 percent of metaphors in the corpus are identified as potentially deliberate metaphors. News and fiction contain significantly more potentially deliberate metaphors, while academic texts and conversations exhibit significantly fewer potentially deliberate metaphors than expected. Moreover, nouns and adjectives are used relatively more frequently as potentially deliberate metaphors, while adverbs, verbs and prepositions are used relatively less frequently as potentially deliberate metaphors. These results can be explained by referring to the overall communicative properties of the registers concerned, as well as to the role of the different word classes in those registers.
KW - Deliberate metaphor
KW - Deliberate metaphor theory
KW - Metaphor identification
KW - Register
KW - Word class
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U2 - 10.3366/cor.2019.0176
DO - 10.3366/cor.2019.0176
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85065798701
VL - 14
SP - 301
EP - 326
JO - Corpora
JF - Corpora
SN - 1749-5032
IS - 3
ER -