Cognitive Corpus Analysis

8/3/2019 Cognitive Corpus Analysis

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knowledge, namely, Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003), have revealed to us

that we are not only surrounded by metaphors in their ubiquity, but we

also live by them even when we are not aware of it. If we take for example

a common expression Ill be there around five oclock, we would hardly

expect from an average speaker to recognize the preposition aroundas ametaphor, and that is exactly what it is, the metaphorical transfer from the

concrete and visible world of space into the abstract and invisible world of

time. And there is no other way of expressing it! Such an example and

many similar ones will show that the internal structure of metaphors

reveals itself as a universal category of human race, but at the same time

the external realisation of metaphors in particular languages is revealed as

a manifestation of particular cultures and all kinds of social groups and

pertaining discourses.

In order to understand this new approach we need to explain how

metaphors work and how they are structured. The first distinction we

should make is the one between conceptual and linguistic metaphors.

Conceptual metaphor is a natural part of human thought, and linguistic

metaphor is a natural part of human language (Lakoff and Johnson 2003,

247). Natural means intrinsic.

Conceptual metaphor is explainedas understanding and experiencingone idea in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson 2004, 5) This processis called mapping, which takes place from a source domain of mainly our

bodily experience into a more abstract target domain, e.g.:

LOVE IS JOURNEY

Target Source

One mapping within a conceptual metaphor LOVE IS JOURNEY can

produce a number of linguistic metaphors where love is expressed and

explained with the structure of journey:

Look, how far weve come.We are at a crossroads.Well just have togo our separate ways.I think this relationship has gone off the track.


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The initiators of this new cognitive approach recognize three basic types of

metaphors:

- structural

- orientational (space)

- ontological (entities)

Structural metaphors are explained as the ones where some aspects of the

target domain are understood and structured by corresponding aspects and

structure of the source domain. Typical examples of such simple structural

metaphors are:

ARGUMENT IS STRUGGLE (WAR)

She attackedevery weak point in my argument.His criticisms were right on target.He retreatedfrom his position on nuclear arms.Those comments about your wife were really below the belt.

TIME IS MONEY

You are wastingmy time.

This gadget willsave you hours.

Ive investeda lot of time in her.Dictionary making is very time-consuming.

More complex cases of structural metaphors are orientational metaphors

where we are not dealing any more with only one concept structured in

terms of another but with a whole system of concepts with respect to one

another. Typical examples are those related to spatial orientation: up-

down, in-out, front-back, deep-shallow, central-peripheral Such

concepts are not arbitrary; they have a basis in our physical and cultural

experience:

HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN:

Im feeling upHes really low these days.Ifellinto depression.You are in high spirits


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GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN

That was a low trick.

She has high standards.

But our physical experience is not entirely limited to spatial or

orientational relations. It is closely associated to all kinds of physical and

visible objects that surround us and which provide the basis for a wide

variety of so called ontological metaphors. In other to grasp or understand

abstract notions and non-physical things we materialize them and view

them as physical entities and substances, a process known in Gestalt-

psychology as reification:

MIND IS MACHINE

I cantprocess new ideas so late at nightAfter the first ten minutes the audience justswitched off.I could never discover what makes him tick.I am a little rusty today.

KNOWLEDGE IS FLUID

We were extremely impressed by the depth of his understanding.

Our company has a reservoirof expertise.

They have watered down his ideas.The committee dilutedmy proposals.

These examples offer enough evidence how metaphors are structured and

how deeply they are immersed in our ever-day language and our

conceptualization of reality. If we accept the fact that metaphorical lang-

uage and thought are closely interrelated, then we cannot avoid reflecting

on the rather disputable Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf

Hypothesis is composed of two basic views of language and thought. The

first is known as Linguistic Determinism, because it claims that

peoples thoughts are determined by the categories available to them in

their language (Pinker 1994, 56). This can be broken up into strong

determinism, i.e. that thoughts are completely determined by language (insome cases that thought and language are identical), and weak

determinism, which claims that thought is somehow affected by language.

This leads us to the second component of the hypothesis, so called

Linguistic Relativity claiming that people who speak different languages

will think about the world in different ways. For example, the way we


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divide or carve up the world is arbitrary, and this carving is different by

each language. So, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is claiming that language

itself affects our perception and categorisation of the world, and that

language will vary in this respect.

Having in mind all pros and cons of those who speak in favour and those

who speak against it, we can conclude that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in

its radical form, implying that language determines our thoughts, proves

to be far-fetched, but a weaker form, that claims that the way in which we

understand reality may be influenced by the kind of language we use, is

generally accepted.

The above conclusion implies the question, can the way in which we use

metaphors influence the way we see the world? If it can, how does it

work? In other to answer this question some interactive metaphor relations

have to be explained. The study of metaphor has shown that a meta-

phorical meaning is not limited by a mapping relation established between

exclusively one source and one target domain, but instead we deal with

much complex relations being the result of interaction of more different

tenors and vehicles, i.e. target and source domains. In this respect, the most

challenging inter-relations are multivalency and diversification (Goatly

2007, 12).

Multivalency is described as the case when the same source domain is

applied to various target domains:

GOOD IS HIGH (Dubrovnik is a top destination)MORE IS HIGH (The prices of property in Dubrovnik issky high).

Because these different targets GOOD (MORALITY / QUALITY) share a

multivalent source they may become associated into an equation MORE =

GOOD. This concept, deeply enrooted in the Western economy and

culture, reinforces patterns of excessive wealth accumulation and

consumption as part of the society ethic. In the opposite sense it is worth

remembering different religious attitudes which promote economicmodesty as a moral imperative.

Another pair of multivalent sources is:

CHANGE IS PATH (Attitudes to womenshiftedin the 19th century)


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SUCCESS IS PATH (She is intelligent and hardworking; I'm sure she'llgoa long way).

This might suggest equation CHANGE = SUCCESS which, according to

A.Goatly is a pattern of consumers behaviour widely recognized in the

Western culture especially in buying the latest and most fashionable

products even if we dont need them, so we frequently change clothes,

cars, mobile phones, etc.

Particularly interesting is the case ofdiversification, which is the opposite

of multivalency, and where different source domains lead to one target

domain:

POLITICAL ACTIVITY IS STRUGGLE (We have won our most difficultbattles in the development of our country)POLITICAL ACTIVITY IS PATH (Weve passed the most difficult

stages on our way to the EU).

So, if we have accepted the idea deriving from Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

that our thoughts are influenced by language, and if we accept the fact that

our way of thinking is metaphorically structured, the question is whether

we can identify somebodys value identity either individual or collectivefrom the dominant metaphorical concepts in ones discourse.

The research that I have done (Susac 2007) through the corpus analysis of

four election campaigns registered in the Internet editions of three major

daily newspapers in Croatia (Vjesnik, Vecerni list, Slobodna Dalmacija)

spanned the period of five years and has proved from more than one

thousand extracted examples that there is evidence of significant

inclination of conservative and liberal parties towards different types of

metaphors. The most dominant source domains in Croatian political

discourse are STRUGGLE and PATH as shown in the Graph 1. and the

first one is visibly preferred by the leading conservative party HDZ

(Croatian Democratic Union), unlike the latter preferred by the leadingsocial-democrat party SDP (Social Democratic Party). The latter is

especially emphasised by the fact that the leading conservative party

significantly outnumbers social-democrats in the overall number of

metaphors used in election campaigns and that the metaphors of PATH

used by the social-democrats are the only ones that outnumber any type of


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metaphors used by conservatives. By coincidence or not, the previous

name of the Social Democratic Party was the Party of Democratic Change,

and if we recall the frequently present multivalency example CHANGE IS

PATH, a possible pattern may be found that will support the assumption of

ideologically loaded metaphors.

Graph 1. The distribution of the most dominant metaphorical source domains

used by political parties members in Croatian election campaigns 2000 2004.

The question whether there are some ideologically loaded metaphors

appears to be particularly interesting in the contemporary research in the

field of cognitive linguistics. This has been the focus of interest of George

Lakoff, the initiator of this new approach to metaphor ever since he pub-

STRUGGLE

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14

16

18

HNS SDP HSS HSLS HDZ HSP

PATH

0

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810

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HNS SDP HSS HSLS HDZ HSP


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lished his masterpiece book Metaphors we Live by in 1980 and of some re-

cent researchers in particular Andrew Goatly who in his recently published

book Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (2007) has traced back the ety-

mology of numbers of dominant metaphors in Western society and showed

us how deeply they are enrooted in our everyday language practice and

thought respectively. So, it is not surprising that some prominent scholars

in the field of cognitive linguistics like Zoltan Kovecses in the afterword

of Goatlys book suggests that: we need to uncover these ideologically-

loaded metaphors and look for alternative ones''This of course resemblesthe logic of political correctness and new language prescriptivism, but

even if we do not approve of this new form of language prescriptivism, we

should certainly be aware of it.

Beside the issue of political identity possibly revealed via dominant

metaphors, the above mentioned research was also aimed at carrying out a

contrastive analysis of English and Croatian conceptual systems, especially

focusing on the subject of metaphor universals and culturally specific

metaphors. Namely, almost everything we have known about cognitive

processes and metaphorical concepts relies on the analysis of the English

based corpus and valid conclusions about universal metaphors and those

culturally determined concepts are not possible without a deep insight into

conceptual systems of as many world languages as possible. This is arather new and an ongoing process in a few research projects carried out

worldwide and as a major reference point most of the researchers indicate

Master Metaphor List of the Berkely University created by Lakoff,

Esperson and Scwartz (1991), and which served as initial point for creating

other existing data basis. This in the first place refers to the data base

browser available on the web sites of the University of Hamburg which

makes possible automatic two-way research of source and target domains

in German, English, and French, together with language examples found

by the post-graduate students of linguistics of the University within their

research of a given corpus.

My research mostly relied on a model of less known METALUDE data base, but interactively the most elaborated data base created at the

University of Lingnan in Hong Kong within the Department of the English

language. It is the most unique data base launched by Andrew Goatley,

only partly referring to the Berkely list, since the former one includes

examples in Chinese as well. The metaphor research is classified according


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to the lexeme units which further on indicate source and target domains or

root analogies which correspond to basic metaphorical concepts. All this

suggested that we were dealing with a useful and articulate browser which

could provide various approaches to the metaphor research and

presumably could serve as a solid model for a similar data base in the

Croatian language and other languages as well.

The results of the above mentioned corpus analysis and the respective

metaphor classification have definitely justified a high applicability of

Goatlys model on the conceptual analysis of the Croatian language,

especially in view of the fact that it was limited to a rather specific type of

discourse, namely the political one, and that the Metalude model was

created on a much wider genre pattern in the English language. The results

have shown that out of 179 conceptual mappings registered in Croatian

language corpus, only 14 of them (8%) were not listed in Goatlys English

classification (Susac 2007, 282). This offers us a firm proof of high com-

patibility between English and Croatian language conceptual systems,

although they belong to two different language families (Germanic and

Slavic).

Beside the high similarity in the two conceptual systems the results have

proven a high degree of overlapping in lexical items used for expressingthe same concepts in both languages. Of the 668 lexemes registered in

Croatian corpus the Metalude data base offers 375 English equivalents in

the same conceptual meaning, which is over 50 %. Additional research of

examples taken from British National Corpus or the existing metaphor

dictionaries would certainly provide even a higher percentage, which

proved to be right through just an evanescent overview of examples

offered by Sommer and Weiss (1996).

There is no doubt that all the registered differences between the two

languages are culturally related and rather specific and should be treated as

such. But the real question is whether all the metaphorical overlappings

and similarities between the two languages can be viewed as metaphoruniversals?

If we take as an example the above mentioned orientational metaphors,

they reveal another important aspect of some metaphors and that is their

metonymic motivation. Metonymy is not less important focus of cognitive


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research than metaphor is and it is mostly based on cause-effect and part

for the whole relations. The basic difference is that metonymic mappings

occur within a single domain, unlike metaphors between two or even more

domains as in latest theories of conceptual integration (Fauconnier, G. and

Turner, M., 1998). This metonymic motivation is not surprising since the

largest number of metaphors is a product of our bodily experience and we

know that some physical reactions are caused by certain emotions.

Namely, sadness is followed by lowering our heads and happiness by

raising them. There are lots of similar concepts deriving form our bodily

experience, e.g. DIFFICULTY IS HEAVINESS (difficulty of lifting heavy

objects), KNOWING/UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (most of infor-

mation we gather through visual channel), AFFECTION IS WARMTH

(the most primary physical sensation of a baby embraced by his/her

mother) etc. This implies the hypothetical conclusion that all the meta-

phorical concepts deriving from our bodily experience and reactions that

we all share as members of the same human race are metonymically

motivated and as such universal. No doubt that the research of conceptual

systems in other languages will further justify or partly reject such

assumptions, but such research cannot be carried by taking random and

intuitive language examples, but only with a hard mining work of corpus

analysis.

With the above conclusion the metaphorical and metonymical motivation

of a language sign becomes the subject of semiotics because it puts in

doubt the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign. This is also emphasized

by a well known fact that metaphors can be found not only in language but

the same ubiquity is present in non-verbal signs as well (Chandler, Daniel,

2002). In other words, iconicity, indexicality and symbolism of the sign

are deeply enrooted in the theory of metaphor and ever since it started

being viewed as a cognitive phenomenon the semiotics of all kinds will

have to refer to it in order to get a deeper insight into the signs we live by

and the way they are used as a means of communication between different

cultures.

Literature:Deignan, A., 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:

John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Chandler, Daniel, 2002. Semiotics: the basics. New York: Routledge.


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Fauconnier, Gilles and Turner, Mark, 1998. Conceptual Integration Networks. In:

Cognitive Science, 22:2, 133-187.

Goatly, Andrew, 2007. Washing the Brain Metaphors and Hidden Ideology.

Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Goatly, Andrew, 1997. The Language of Metaphors. London, New York:

Routledge.

Hamburg Metaphor Database query. [30.1.2007].

Kovecses, Zoltan, 2005. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, 1980/2003. Metaphors We Live By (with new

afterword). Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George/Espenson, Jane/Schwartz, Alan 1991. Master metaphor list.

Second draft copy. Cognitive Linguistics Group. University of California

Berkeley. http://cogsci.berkeley.edu [30.1. 2007].

METALUDE Metaphor at Lingnan University Department of English. [30.1.2007].

Pinker, Steven, 1994. The Language Instinct. London: Penguin.

Sommer, Elyse and Weiss, Dorrie, 1996. Metaphors Dictionary. Detroit: Visible

Ink Press.

Susac, Vlado, 2007. Konceptualna metafora u politikom govoru (Conceptual

Metaphor in Political Discourse). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of

Zadar.

Wierzbicka, Anna, 1999. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity andUniversals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/

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