Corpus-based Studies of Metaphor: An Overview

Abstract

The researchers performed this systematic review to offer insights into the trend of the corpus-based approach in studying metaphor in recent years and investigate the potential gaps and under-researched areas in the past literature on the topic. Two research databases, namely Google Scholar and Academics, were explored to collect data. The analysis of metaphor-related research studies published between 2015 and 2020 revealed more than 78 studies dealing with the topic of investigation. After the screening process, 23 studies that met the research criteria were retained for analysis. The selected articles were further analyzed using the two-step analysis involving quantitative and qualitative approaches, i.e., descriptive statistics, and thematic analysis. The findings revealed that metaphor studies employing the corpus approach tend to use existing corpus like the Reference Corpus instead of a specialized corpus. In addition, metaphor studies in this review centered more on written discourse than spoken data. Furthermore, there is also a lack of information on the corpus tool employed in the examined studies. Meanwhile, the thematic analysis unearthed potential gaps and under-researched areas, such as limited studies on COVID-19 metaphor even though the outbreak had started at the end of 2019. Future studies on this research could include more specialized corpora, specifically in the under-researched topics, to fill in the gaps in this area of study

Bibliometric, network, and thematic mapping analyses of metaphor and discourse in COVID-19 publications from 2020 to 2022

“…Despite being limited to metaphor research of COVID-19 metaphors in 2020, Silva ( 2020 ) conducted an analysis of research production and found that the conceptual metaphor COVID-19 AS AN ENEMY was widely used in news discourse during the pandemic. Abdul Malik et al ( 2022 ) provided an overview study of metaphor research and closely examined 23 studies between 2015 and 2020. They found five major research trends in metaphor research: conceptualizations and patterns of metaphors, metaphor and health, metaphor, ideology, and persuasion, metaphor and culture , and metaphor and languages (Abdul Malik et al, 2022 ).…”

“…Abdul Malik et al ( 2022 ) provided an overview study of metaphor research and closely examined 23 studies between 2015 and 2020. They found five major research trends in metaphor research: conceptualizations and patterns of metaphors, metaphor and health, metaphor, ideology, and persuasion, metaphor and culture , and metaphor and languages (Abdul Malik et al, 2022 ). Other content analyses were used such as the distribution of journals over the years, the corpus tools that were used in previous studies, the general corpora used, and whether previous studies employed theoretical frameworks such as conceptual metaphor theory.…”