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Time metaphors in English and Croatian: A corpus- based study

Since the publication of the theory of conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), many researchers have devoted themselves to exploring various aspects of metaphor, such as poetic metaphor (Lakof and Johnson 1989), bodily basis of metaphor (Kövecses 2000), cultural and cross- linguistic aspects of metaphor (Kövecses 2004), or translational aspects of metaphor (Schäffner 2004). The majority of these studies rely on a procedure where the researcher carefully reads through the corpus, extracting all the metaphors he or she comes across, i.e. the procedure of manual searching. However, corpus-based methods have over past fifteen years established themselves as a major empirical paradigm in lingu- istics. The research on metaphor is somewhat lagging behind with respect to this development, but recently, a number of scholars have made attempts to remedy the situation (see Stefanowitsch 2006a). One of the great resource books on the corpus-based methods in metaphor (and metonymy) research is the recently published collection of essays entitled Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy, edited by Anatol Stefanowitsch and Stefan Th. Gries (2006). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor have many comparative advantages over manual searching, and a few problems. One of the major problems is that of identifying and extracting the relevant data from the corpus. This is not an easy task because conceptual mappings are not linked to particular word forms. Stefanowitch (2006a) suggests several strategies for searching the corpus, such as searching for SD (source domain) vocabulary, searching for TD (target do-main) vocabulary, searching for SD + TD vocabulary, searching for “markers of metaphor” (metaphorically speaking, so to speak, etc.), as well as searching of annotated corpora. In any case, the results of a corpus- based approach are ex-haustive and systematic, in contrast to the introspective and opportunistic nature of manual searching. Using corpus-based methods makes it possible to investi-gate the linguistic nature of metaphor. The richness of data can lead to reanalysis (e.g. ARGUMENT IS WAR in Stefanowitsch (2006a) is reanalysed as ANTAGONIST COMMUNICATION IS PHYSICAL CONFLICT) or to distinguishing between different degrees of metaphoricity. The nature of corpus data is inherently quantitative, and the frequencies that we get as results of studies make it possible to assess the systematicity of conceptual mappings. Among other advantages over manual searching, there is the use of corpus data with the view to uncover cross-linguistic and diachronic differences across speech communities, which is im-possible to do on the basis of introspection only. With these comparative advantages of the corpus-based methods in mind, we set out to do a contrastive case study of TIME metaphors in English and Croatian, the details of which can be found in the following chapters.

metaphor; corpus linguistics; Croatian; English, cognitive linguistics; time

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