A corpus study of metaphors and metonyms in English and Italian
Introduction
For researchers in language description, the work of Lakoff and his followers (e.g. Lakoff, 1987, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) has potentially great explanatory power. One implication is that the different senses of a polysemous word are not arbitrary historical developments, but can be traced to an underlying conceptual metaphor. Their model (often termed “conceptual metaphor theory”) thus offers an explanation for why two distinct semantic fields can be talked about using many of the same words and expressions: each of these pairs of words and expressions can be seen as the realisation of a conceptual metaphor that connects the two domains at the level of thought. For instance, lexical items from the field of light, such as radiant or bright are also used in the field of emotion to describe happiness, realising the conceptual metaphor happiness is light (Kövecses, 1991).
Because conceptual metaphor theory claims to describe central processes and structures of human thought, it is not language-specific and should have explanatory power for languages other than English; it is therefore of potential use in cross-linguistic research. Although Lakoff (1993) rarely refers to languages other than English, his discussion of the theory is suggestive. He claims that the most central metaphors are grounded in our human physical experience (1993: 240), and as evidence for this position, argues that where the same conceptual metaphors exist in different languages, they tend to function in similar ways. For instance, he claims that in languages where directions are used to talk metaphorically about quantities, the equation is always up with more and down with less, never the reverse. Gibbs, 1993, Gibbs, 1994 also argues for the experiential basis of central metaphors. He examines linguistic metaphors used to talk about anger and claims that many of these are realisations of the conceptual metaphor anger is heated fluid in a container. Examples that reflect this metaphor are She got all steamed up and I was fuming (1994: 203). He claims that we each perceive our own body as a container and when we become angry we experience physical sensations of heat and internal pressure, and therefore, the metaphor has an experiential motivation. This would imply that the same conceptual metaphor and similar linguistic realisations might be found in other cultures and languages.
There have been a number of cross-linguistic studies which have investigated the possibility that metaphors are not language-specific. Sweetser has carried out research on conceptual metaphors of perception across a number of languages, finding that they are highly consistent (1990). Detailed comparisons of individual languages suggest that emotion metaphors are also shared. For instance, Yu (1995) analysed Chinese metaphors for anger and found that the heat and pressure elements of the metaphor are the same as those in English described by Gibbs (1994); the only difference between the two languages is that gas is used instead of fluid to characterise anger in the Chinese metaphor. Emanatian (1995) studied metaphors in Chagga, a language spoken in Tanzania, and found lexicalisations of lust is fire, a metaphor in English identified by Lakoff (1987). Kövecses examined metaphors for happiness in Hungarian and found many commonalities with English and Chinese (2002). The similarities between metaphorical mappings found by these researchers, across unrelated languages, show that at least some conceptual metaphors are widely shared.
Researchers have not found complete consistency however. Deignan et al. (1997) investigated metaphors in Polish and English by asking English-speaking Polish informants to gauge the translatability of English metaphors into Polish. They found a number of close equivalents across the two languages, but they also found cases where linguistic metaphors varied. In some cases it seemed likely that this was because the linguistic expressions are different surface realisations of the same conceptual metaphor. However, they also found cases where apparently different conceptual metaphors were used. This last finding might be reconcilable with the contemporary theory, if it were argued that the language-specific conceptual metaphors they found are in some way less fundamental than those that they found in both languages (but this is a somewhat circular argument). Boers and Demecheleer (1997) studied metaphors in economics texts in English, French and Dutch, and found differences in the frequencies of various metaphors across the three languages, differences which they ascribed to cultural factors. It seems then that there is evidence that some metaphors are common to a number of languages, but a great deal more work is needed to determine the extent and relative frequencies of shared metaphors.
Section snippets
Aims and approaches
The contemporary theory of metaphor has for the most part been developed by cognitive linguists and psychologists, whose central goal is to find out more about thought. Researchers in language description have a different agenda; while they do not deny the importance of thought, their own central concern is to account for patterns found in language in use. This difference in aims leads to differences in focus and methodology. For cognitive linguists, the purpose of examining language data is to
Corpora and methodology
The study described here aims to describe and compare a set of related linguistic metaphors across two languages, English and Italian, within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. As discussed in Section 1, a central issue in the cross-linguistic study of metaphor is the extent to which we draw on human universals in order to create shared metaphors. Several important studies have suggested that the domain of body parts is central in metaphorising bodily experience (for example,
Non-literal language in the corpora: frequency and fixedness
The most immediately striking finding is that non-literal language is extremely common, often accounting for a substantial proportion of the corpus citations of a word. This is consistent with the reported experience of corpus lexicographers (Lewis, 1993). In our data, for example, around 65% of citations of head(s) and heart(s), around 50% of hand(s) and eye(s), around 25% of citations of nose(s), and around 17% of citations of mouth are non-literal (but see Section 5 where the difficulty of
Types of non-literal language found
Having made some general observations about frequency and about the linguistic patterns we noted, we move on to describe the different kinds of non-literal language that we found in the data. We divide these into metaphor, metonymy, and two further classes which involve the interaction of metaphor and metonymy, which are taken from Goossens’ dictionary-based explorations of non-literal language (1990, 1995). We add a fifth category, image, which spans the literal/non-literal boundary.
Non-literal language in English and Italian: meaning
Having classified the various kinds of non-literal language that we found in the various corpora we studied, we can now compare them across the two languages. We begin with a close comparison of metaphorical uses of the English and Italian translation equivalents of one word. We then consider which non-literal uses are shared by English and Italian, and which seem to be motivated by direct bodily experience, or other shared metaphors. We then look at metaphors that do not exist with the same
Non-literal language in English and Italian: linguistic realisations
In this section, we discuss more closely some of the linguistic patterns that were found. Differences between the two languages were found to be more marked when the data was examined at this level of detail.
Conclusion
Returning to the explanatory possibilities of conceptual metaphor theory, the results of our corpus searches seem initially a little disappointing. This limited study has not reflected a picture of freely-forming networks of metaphorical senses in either language. Rather, what emerges is a patchy picture of a few words from the same literal domain being used with a non-literal meaning that could be attributed to a body-mind mapping. The various mappings have resulted in a limited number of
Acknowledgments
Our thanks are due to Dr. Eugenio Picchi for permission to use the data from the two Italian corpora, and Lisa Biagini for her kindness and patience in providing the concordances. We would also like to thank former colleagues at Cobuild for many invaluable discussions about meaning and collocational patterns.
Alice Deignan is a senior lecturer at the School of Education, University of Leeds. She is the author of Collins Cobuild Guides to English 7: Metaphor (HarperCollins, London, 1995) and her research focuses on using corpora to investigate non-literal language use.
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Alice Deignan is a senior lecturer at the School of Education, University of Leeds. She is the author of Collins Cobuild Guides to English 7: Metaphor (HarperCollins, London, 1995) and her research focuses on using corpora to investigate non-literal language use.
Liz Potter is a research fellow of the University of Birmingham. She has worked as a bilingual lexicographer for Longman and as a lexicographer for various publishers including Collins Cobuild. She researches in the field of corpus lexicography.