Metaphor in communication: The distribution of potentially deliberate metaphor across register and word class

W. Gudrun Reijnierse; Christian Burgers; Tina Krennmayr; Gerard J. Steen

doi:10.3366/cor.2019.0176

Metaphor in communication: The distribution of potentially deliberate metaphor across register and word class

W. Gudrun Reijnierse^*, Christian Burgers, Tina Krennmayr, Gerard J. Steen

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

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Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	301-326
Number of pages	26
Journal	Corpora
Volume	14
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2019.0176
Publication status	Published - Nov 2019

Funding

The contribution of W. Gudrun Reijnierse was supported by Grant No. 322–89–006, awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), see: www.nwo.nl. The research reported in this paper is part of Reijnierse’s doctoral dissertation, supervised by the second, third and fourth author. This research was carried out within the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam, a joint venture of the Network Institute (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC; University of Amsterdam), see: www.metaphorlab.amsterdam. Reijnierse is currently at the Centre for Language Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Keywords

Deliberate metaphor
Deliberate metaphor theory
Metaphor identification
Register
Word class

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Metaphor in communication The distribution of potentially deliberate metaphor across register and word classFinal published version, 201 KBLicence: Article 25fa Dutch Copyright Act

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PY - 2019/11

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Metaphor in communication: The distribution of potentially deliberate metaphor across register and word class

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