Elise Stickles of the UBC English department will present a colloquium. The title and abstract are below.
Click to join Zoom meeting. The passcode is 635410. (The meeting ID is 647 6334 5823.)
Usage-based approaches to metaphor analysis and construction grammar: A case study of the English Event Structure Metaphor System
Metaphor is pervasive in our everyday communication and intrinsic to our reasoning processes. Evidence from the investigation of metaphor in non-linguistic modalities, combined with recent advances in technology that enable the statistical analysis of metaphoric language, demonstrates the need for a more data-driven, systematic treatment of metaphor as an integral part of both semantics and syntax.
In this talk, I will be focusing on the Event Structure Metaphor System (ESM) in English. The ESM can be divided into two subsystems, as demonstrated in the following examples from COCA:
(1) If he can create jobs and help more Americans climb out of poverty, count us in.
(2) …as if great wealth and fortune were just within their grasp.
Both example (1) and (2) metaphorically conceptualize economic status in terms of physical events. In (1), economic status is a location on vertically-oriented scale, in which poverty is a lower location and financial security is a higher location. This is an illustration of the Location Event Structure System (LESM), in which states of being are understood as locations, and change of state is movement from one location to another. In contrast, in (2) economic status is an objectwhich can be grasped (or out of reach); this illustrates the Object Event Structure System, in which states are understood as objects which can be possessed, gained, or lost. Together these two systems constitute a network of interrelated, hierarchical metaphors which are used in English (and many other languages) to describe and conceptualize states of being and changes of state.
These examples also illustrate common constructional relationships between metaphor and syntax. When both the source domain (e.g., location) and target domain (e.g., economic status) are lexically realised, the source domain is indicated by the verb and the target domain by one of its arguments, as in (1). When both source and target are realised as nominals as in (2), the specific construction determines which nominal slots will contain the source or target domain language. (2) is an example of the NP1 PP NP2 construction, in which NP1 takes the target domain and NP2 the source. It can be compared to the following:
(3) …to get out of the pit of poverty…
Example (3), which is another instance of the LESM, also has both the source and target domain in NPs. However, the NP1 of NP2 construction, unlike NP1 PP NP2, has the source domain in NP1 and target in NP2.
I will make use of this metaphor system, focusing on metaphors of motion within the LESM, to illustrate two empirical approaches to metaphor analysis. First, I will provide a brief overview of the MetaNet metaphor ontology and identification system and its use in the analysis of frequency and variation of metaphoric language in large written corpora. Second, I will discuss a novel experimental methodology for eliciting and collecting spontaneous spoken metaphoric language and co-speech gesture. The results of these studies both lead to a refined analysis of the Event Structure Metaphor System and pose challenges for current theories of metaphor and representation of linguistic structures. In answer to these challenges, I propose an implementation of Embodied Construction Grammar which incorporates the semantics of metaphoric representations.
