From the 1980s onwards there has been a huge interest in the cognitive aspects of metaphor, i.e. how we use metaphorical processes in our everyday thinking. Much of this has been inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors we Live By (1980), where they give examples of cognitive metaphors like THE MIND IS A MACHINE. This image then gives rise to metaphorical expressions like My mind just isn’t working today and I’m a little rusty today. Here, MACHINE is called the ‘source domain’ and the thing that is described, MIND, is called the ‘target domain’.
In this session we will see how computer corpora (large text databases) can be used to investigate metaphors, starting both from the source domain and the target domain to find examples like (1) and (2).

(1) […] about a million gears were spinning in her head, all meshing perfectly, well-oiled, quiet and productive.
(2) His mind was a slurry of confusion.

After the workshop, the participants will have a clearer picture of the use of metaphors in everyday English and the ability to carry out investigations of their own in freely available corpora on the web.

[プロフィール]
Hans Lindquist
Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English (2004 共著:John Benjamins)、Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English (2009年12月予定、エジンバラ大学出版) など、英語のコーパス分析で知られる。