Written by Gill Philip Compiled by Michal Petrov, 2011 Metaphorical keyness in specialized corpora Contents 1.Introduction 2.Metaphor and textual meaning 3.Metaphors and corpora 4.Metaphor themes and key metaphor themes 5.Conclusion Introduction —… key words tell us what is important, they do not tell us why. — —Flection in languages (difference in frequency) —Groupings in low-frequency vocabulary suggest metaphorical activity. —Metaphors express "affect and attitude along with ideational content" → evaluation —Delexical metaphors Metaphor and textual meaning —Metaphor theme tradeiswar.png Metaphor and textual meaning —Creative and conventional metaphors — —Most metaphors are naturalized lexical items, forming part of the conventinal vocabulary. As such they are virtually invisible yet their presence can be perceived subliminaly. —Instances of metaphor themes rise in importance with each subsequent reappearence in the discourse. — Metaphors and corpora —Instances of metaphor themes: —spread across many texts —identification is problematic and time-consuming —even corpora are not successful – machines can look for words but not meaning —Usual solution: partial or total manual searching —Goal: identifying potential metaphorical themes instead of locating all metaphores — Metaphors and corpora corpora.png Emma Bonino, Minister for International Trade and Commerce, Minister for European Policy (June 2006 – May 2007) 140,000 words; Italian Metaphors and corpora —WordSmith Tools v4 — —Metaphor requires the presence of an contextually incongruous lexis. —The lexis will not occur near the top of a word-frequency list nor amongst the statistically-generated key words. Metaphors and corpora —Data: —Word frequency list for the ComInt corpus —Key word list according to the entire political corpus (430,000 words) —elimination of words like "minister" or "government" that are common in political language —Identified groups: —Markets and sectors, business and industry, the economy, import and export … — Metaphors and corpora —Low frequency content words (LFCWs) may provide a source of metaphorically-used lexis —LFCWs make up a large portion of the list —Not all low-frequency lexis is metaphorical lowfreq.png Metaphors and corpora —Analysis: —Manual lemmatization of the top of the word frequency list → elimination of low-frequency inflected forms (up to 500 types) —Sorting of the rest into broadly-defined semantic groups (five or more lemmas, initial cut-off at 3 occurences) —Lemmas that could not be grouped with others were considered metaphor candidates —The higher the frequency of a candidate the more consistent was its patterning in the corpus Metaphors and corpora penetrazione.png Metaphor themes and key metaphor themes —Analysis yielded a large set of word forms: —War and violence —Hunting, risk, submission and suffering, health, birth, death, emotion —These areas do not become metaphor themes until the target domains have been ascertained —Business is war → International trade is war Metaphor themes and key metaphor themes —War metaphors are the most frequent in this corpus and a theme common to all political discourse —In the given corpus those metaphors were linked to foreign trade with partuclar reference to China and India —battaglia (struggle) – Italy —lotta (fight) – Made in Italy —penetrazione – Italian expansion —Invasione – expansion of China and India Metaphor themes and key metaphor themes —Key metaphors are not key because they are the most frequent but because they interact in significant ways with the key words. —Downward collocation is significant. —"the use and re-use of metaphors leads to conventionalization of attitudinal judgement towards them" Metaphor themes and key metaphor themes emergence.png Conclusion —Keyness represented by statistically-generated key words is overt while keyness represented by metaphors is hidden from view. — —Overt keyness tells us what is the key and covert keyness tells us the reasons why. Conclusion —Key word list indicates that China is important but does not provide reasons for the prominence. —Examining metaphorical activity reveals two aspects: 1.Chinese exports and current Chinese economical policy are perceived as a threat 2.China is mentioned frequently because of the threat it poses Conclusion —Metaphors play an important evaluative role —But (!) the source domain lexical items are not interchangeable.