Metaphor Analysis: Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities

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 can better understand their emotions, attitudes and conceptualisations, as individuals and as participants in social life. This book describes practice in the analysis of metaphor in real-world discourse.

When real-world language use is taken as the site of metaphor study, researchers face methodological issues that have only recently begun to be addressed. The contributors to this volume have all had to find ways to deal with methodological issues in their own research and have developed techniques that are brought together here. Using as a basis the discourse dynamics approach to metaphor developed by the editor, the book explores links between theory and empirical investigation, exemplifies data analysis and discusses issues in research design and practice. Particular attention is paid to the processes of metaphor identification, categorisation and labelling, and to the use of corpus linguistic and other computer-assisted methods.

Lynne Cameron is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Centre for Language and Communication, The Open University. Robert Maslen is a Research Associate at the Centre for Language and Communication, the Open University. He gained his PhD in language acquisition from the Department of Psychology, University of Manchester (with funding from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig). His work in applied linguistics has included research on terrorism risk communications and the expression of empathy in discourse.