Metaphor Analysis Project > Introduction

Why analyse metaphor?
Metaphor is recognised as an important way of thinking – constructing analogies and making connections between ideas – and an important way of using language – to explain abstract ideas or to find indirect but powerful ways of conveying feelings. By investigating people’s use of metaphors, we suggest that we can better understand their emotions, attitudes and conceptualisations, as individuals and as participants in social life. 

What’s new here?
Our particular concern is with metaphors in the dynamics of language use, i.e. in discourse. Existing approaches to metaphor have been concerned with poetic metaphor in literature, with metaphor in thought rather than in language, with metaphor in language as a formal system rather than metaphor in use of language.

When discourse is taken as the site of metaphor study, researchers face methodological issues that have only recently begun to be addressed. MetNet members have all had to find ways to deal with methodological issues in their own research and have developed techniques that are brought together here.

Contemporary theories of metaphor
The four background papers cover some of the major ideas currently active in the field of metaphor. The first paper summarises the cognitive view of metaphor that has dominated the field since the 1980s, replacing earlier views that saw metaphor as decorative or literary use of language. The other three present recent responses and challenges to Conceptual Metaphor theory.

The theoretical framework chosen by a researcher will influence all aspects of the empirical work – what research questions are asked, what kind of data is collected, how the data is analysed, how findings are interpreted, and what claims are made on the basis of analytic findings.

Data
The training materials use two sets of discourse data:

Focus group data: We use an extract of talk from a focus group interview talking about life in a midlands town in UK. Permission to use this data for academic purposes has kindly been given by the researcher who deposited it with the ESRC Qualidata Archive. In order to access the data you will need a password and to agree to the terms and conditions set down by the ESRC. Please send an e-mail to L.J.Cameron@open.ac.uk requesting a password from your academic e-mail address or giving some other way for us to check your academic credentials.

Speech data: To contrast with spontaneous talk, the other piece of discourse is a political speech given by British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. This is in the public domain, and can be accessed at http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/story/0,,1412458,00.html

We have also uploaded a version with line numbers.

Procedure for Metaphor Analysis
These pages take you through the steps of metaphor analysis:

Finding metaphors in discourse data

Building metaphor groupings

Finding metaphor clusters

Analysing metaphors in discourse structure

Metaphor and gesture

Corpus Techniques for metaphor analysis

Annotated bibliography
This page describes empirical studies that use metaphor analysis and that may serve as examples of good research.