What is it about?

This is a light-hearted piece that takes a look at some of the issues raised when identifying metaphors in discourse: what dictionary are you supposed to use? I discuss the problems with the dictionary often recommended for this, but more generally wonder what value a lexical (as opposed to a discourse) approach to metaphor identification has.

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Why is it important?

There are two procedures for identifying metaphors in discourse that seem to be valued when getting one's work published (i.e. MIP [Pragglejaz Group, 2007] and MIPVU [Steen et al, 2010]). It seems to me that there has been far too little discussion and feedback on these proposals and that editors and reviewers may be overly confident that these procedures return reliable (or interesting) results. We need to submit them to more critical appraisal.

Perspectives

I very much appreciated that the editors of the journal not only accepted the piece for publication, but also that they invited two responses from experts in the field. However, I do not think that the questions I have raised have been answered: how can/should we consider metaphor in discourse, as opposed to looking it at the word level? Words on their own mean very little.

Dr Fiona MacArthur
Universidad de Extremadura

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This page is a summary of: On using a dictionary to identify the basic senses of words, Metaphor and the Social World, July 2015, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/msw.5.1.07mac.
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