engleski

Metaphor Identification Problem or Can We Extract Water from the Lake?

Ever since the ‘cognitive turn’ in the theory of metaphor, which resulted in abandoning the old rhetorical approach focused on language metaphors primarily as a matter of style, anyone dealing with corpus analysis has inevitably faced the problem of metaphor identification. The newly advocated ubiquity or omnipresence of metaphors in thought and consequently in language recognized through various kinds of conceptual mappings poses a methodological problem of the metaphor demarcation from the rest of the language material. From diachronical perspective the metaphorical motivation can be etymologically traced back to the beginnings of human speech, especially in TIME - SPACE mappings or other embodied experience that we share as a human race, let alone other relative concepts produced by particular cultures. Purely synchronical approach to the phenomenon only partly resolves the problem with language analysis, still largely reducing the metaphoric repository for thought and inherent conceptual relations. As a paradox, even what is left in this reduced approach and recognized as metaphorical by following Metaphor Identification Procedure is not always processed metaphorically in the minds of speakers (or listeners) through cross-domain mapping from one concept to another. This tension between linguistic and cognitive perspective has been resolved by some authors (Steen, in particular) by offering intersubjective approach, where communication becomes the focus of our attention. It reconciles the traditional rhetoric with the later cognitive views by means of intentionality or awareness as a primary marker in metaphor identification, where cross- domain mappings are clearly evoked in the minds of speakers and listeners. By accepting this adapted procedure, the previously presented corpus analysis of the conceptual systems in political discourse, which included deliberate and non deliberate metaphors, will be re- examined, especially in view of dominant metaphorical mappings belonging to opposed political groups. The results will show whether the majority concepts of deliberate political metaphors significantly differ in quality and number from those that belong to a mere language habit.

metaphor identification, corpus analysis, intentionality, communication

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