How to find everyday metaphor in text

What is it about?

This article discusses the difficulties of finding metaphorical words or expressions in a text; in particular, deciding whether a given word is metaphorically used or not. It is concerned with identification by a human reader rather than automatic extraction by computers, and is primarily focused on everyday conventional metaphors such as an invisible enemy, flaw in the system, opposing sides, etc., not poetic figures of speech. Different theories of metaphor have diverging ideas about what metaphor is and where it can be detected, and the methodologies reflect these differences. One widespread method (MIPVU) which uses dictionary meaning paraphrases to identify senses is illustrated in detail and some modification of this method is proposed in compound words and idioms.

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