Metaphor Use in Three UK University Lectures

Low, Graham; Littlemore, Jeannette; Koester, Almut

doi:10.1093/applin/amn008

Cited by 89 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Similar results were reported by Low et al (2008) in the study of metaphors in three academic lectures. The authors argued that metaphor signaling was inconsistent and infrequent, and they related the differences detected to the degree of discourse formality.…”

Section: Metaphor Signalingsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…Newspaper writing is highly creative and rich in expressions, exhibiting a higher figurative density than the political briefings, which in general confirms findings on written and spoken discourse by Wallington et al (2003). What is interesting is that sort of is also used in newspaper writing, in addition to being used in informal lectures, as discussed in Low et al (2008). These are two very different genres and levels of formality, and this indicates that the signal itself might be used in different genres; that is, within any one study, comparisons may be made regarding what types of signals are used and how frequently they are used, but it is difficult to draw comparisons across studies that focus on small samples of discourse using different methodological approaches.…”

Section: Metaphor Signalingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Journalists who write for popular science magazines often use metaphorical language for pedagogical reasons, since metaphors often involve concrete and familiar concepts to aid readers in understanding concepts they may find abstract and difficult to grasp. In addition, the use of metaphors in educational contexts has been widely researched (e.g., Cameron 2003; Cameron and Low 2004;Low et al 2008), and popular science discourse fulfills communicative functions that are similar to other types of educational discourse, such as science classroom talk.…”

Section: Metaphor Signals In the Us Presidentialmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres

Skorczynska¹,

Ahrens²

2015

Text &Amp; Talk

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This study examines the use of words and phrases that signal metaphors in three genres in order to further examine the corpus-based evidence for signaling variation mentioned in previous research. While previous studies have focused on pragmatic functions, discourse functions, and the level of conventionalization, this study demonstrates that the communicative goals within each genre underlie the reasons for the metaphor signaling. Three corpora of approximately 600,000 words were created for this research, and they were made up of US presidential addresses, popular science articles, and business periodical articles. The corpora were electronically queried for the use of sixteen previously identified metaphor signals in order to obtain comparable quantitative data. The study was complemented by a qualitative analysis of the identified instances of signaled metaphors. We found that three metaphor signal categories -copular similes, verbal processes, and modals/conditionals -accounted for the large majority of the signals analyzed in the genres. Furthermore, we found that while copular similes and verbal processes signals were used for different rhetorical purposes, depending on the communicative goals of each genre, the conditional signal was always used to foreshadow metaphorically expressed possibilities, regardless of the genre in which it was used.

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Section: Metaphor Signalingsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Metaphor Signalingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Metaphor Signals In the Us Presidentialmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres

Skorczynska¹,

Ahrens²

2015

Text &Amp; Talk

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“…Littlemore (2001Littlemore ( , 2003 points out that metaphors in university lectures cause problems of understanding among international students, which is quite unexpected for lecturers. Both metaphor identification techniques described by Low et al (2007) rely on researchers' ability to discriminate between metaphorical and non-metaphorical use of a language. The first technique, the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), rests on isolating lexical items that are used metaphorically (Steen 2004, Pragglejaz Group 2007, leading to quantitative analyses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Obscurity in the Micropolitics of English for Legal Purposes: Towards an Anthropological Framework

Barrault-Méthy¹

2015

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Summary. Research in English for Legal Purposes (ELP) has expanded in the past30 years, in parallel with the increasing attractiveness of transnational legal education. The present paper aims at observing how ELP research has dealt with the issue of globalisation of law studies, considering that legal taxonomies remain largely national. The analysis expands on the application of Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (ASI) theory (Durand 1969) to a language policy context to describe the positioning of ELP researchers and law experts in relation to each other. Focusing on the notion of posture, an the analysis of images in a corpus of 68 ELP research papers suggests that the theme of obscurity lies at the heart of ELP research discourse. Power-related images fall into the four broad categories of animality, depression, the fall and the labyrinth. The contribution of ASI theory to the study of the micropolitics of ELP thus appears to be two-fold. ASI theory sheds light on the metadiscourse on power that runs through ELP research and that helps understand agents' positioning. ASI theory applied to ELP research eventually sheds light on the aporia (Glanert, 2005) Legal English researchers and law experts are faced with in an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) context.

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“…However, the other side of the coin is that metaphor can be a useful guide to the structure of dialogue and to summarisation, because certain types of metaphor are often used by speakers to signal topic changes, to summarise a segment of dialogue that has just occurred or is about to occur, or to refer to the structure of the discourse itself (Cameron 2003;Drew and Holt 1998;Low et al 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

Challenges in natural language processing: the case of metaphor (commentary)

Barnden

2008

Int J Speech Technol

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This article comments on some ways in which metaphor is relevant to practical language technology, for either text or speech. While the article mentions some deep problems, it nevertheless points out that certain issues are less troublesome than they might appear to be, and that metaphor in real discourse has some characteristics that could help, rather than hinder, practical discourseprocessing. The article also mentions the author's ongoing work on developing a new view of how metaphor and metonymy relate to each other. This view is based on a deconstruction into underlying dimensions.Keywords Metaphor · Metonymy · Figurative language · Natural language understanding · Natural language technology · Natural language pragmatics · Discourse processing · Lexical resources · Language resources · Ontologies Of the many challenges facing the practical application of natural language processing, there is one in particular that has seen especially little serious computational attention: namely the problem of metaphor. Although many researchers not in the metaphor area may be tempted to think of metaphor as a peripheral problem (perhaps mostly to do with poetry and other literary language) it is in fact a pervasive feature of mundane language (conversation, newspaper articles, popular science writing, etc.). See for instance many of the contributions to a recent metaphor handbook (Gibbs 2008).

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Metaphor Use in Three UK University Lectures

Cited by 89 publications

References 17 publications

A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres

A corpus-based study of metaphor signaling variations in three genres

Obscurity in the Micropolitics of English for Legal Purposes: Towards an Anthropological Framework

Challenges in natural language processing: the case of metaphor (commentary)

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