A case study of comparative metaphor analysis in Finnish and Hungarian news texts

Abstract

Despite remarkable previous results of cognitive linguistic analysis of metaphorization in Finnish and Hungarian even in a cross-linguistic context (Huumo 2019; Máthé 2022), a systematic comparative study of the patterns of linguistic metaphors in these two languages is still to be carried out. The aim of this paper is to fill this research gap by proposing a MIPVU-inspired protocol for metaphor identification in languages with rich morphology and presenting the preliminary results of a small-scale corpus analysis. The study is organized around the following questions: (i) How can we adapt and extend the original MIPVU method for agglutinative Uralic languages like Hungarian and Finnish? (ii) How can we implement the adapted method in a collaborative parallel annotation process of sampled news texts? (iii) What are the differences in metaphorical patterns between Finnish and Hungarian? The paper details the adapted protocol of MIPVU for the Hungarian language (Simon et al. 2023), and how it can be applied to Finnish, demonstrating its applicability in a research corpus. Our findings demonstrate a relatively similar metaphorization in Hungarian and Finnish with slight differences in terms of the frequency of metaphorical expressions, their semantic relations, and the complexity of argument structure constructions.