MIPVU: A manual for identifying metaphor-related words 25 2.1 The basic procedure 25 2.2 Deciding about words: Lexical units 26 2.2.1 General guideline 27 2.2.2 Exceptions 27 2.3 Indirect use potentially explained by cross-domain mapping 32 2.3.1 Identifying contextual meanings 33 2.3.2 Deciding about more basic meanings 35 2.3.3 Deciding about sufficient distinctness 37 2.3.4 Deciding about the role of similarity 37 2.4 Direct use potentially explained by cross-domain mapping 38 2.5 Implicit meaning potentially explained by cross-domain mapping 39 2.6 Signals of potential cross-domain mappings 40 2.7 New-formations and parts that may be potentially explained by cross-domain mapping 41

This paper examines patterns of metaphor in usage. Four samples of text excerpts of on average 47,000 words each were taken from the British National Corpus and annotated for metaphor. The linguistic metaphor data were collected by five analysts on the basis of a highly explicit identification procedure that is a variant of the approach developed by the Pragglejaz Group (Metaphor and Symbol 22: 1–39, 2007). Part of this paper is a report of the protocol and the reliability of the procedure. Data analysis shows that, on average, one in every seven and a half lexical units in the corpus is related to metaphor defined as a potential cross-domain mapping in conceptual structure. It also appears that the bulk of the expression of metaphor in discourse consists of non-signalled metaphorically used words, not similes. The distribution of metaphor-related words, finally, turns out to be quite variable between the four registers examined in this study: academic texts have 18.5%, news 16.4%, fiction 11.7%, and conversation 7.7%. The systematic comparative investigation of these registers raises new questions about the relation between cognitive linguistic and other approaches to metaphor.

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Drawing on examples from a corpus of 14 excerpts from novels, this article aims to present a systematic investigation of the different linguistic forms, conceptual structures and communicative functions of personification in discourse. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and Steen’s five-step procedure (1999, 2009) will be used to present an integral model distinguishing between linguistic, conceptual, and communicative levels of analysis. The influence of linguistic realization, conventionality, deliberateness, metonymy, and stylistic effects will be considered and it will be demonstrated that studying personifications in discourse raises different issues at each level of analysis. As a result, the question whether something should count as a personification may yield a different answer for each level.

This paper offers an integrated typology for the classification of personifications in discourse, based on existing methods for linguistic metaphor identification such as MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and MIPVU (Steen et al., 2010). The psychological relevance of the proposed typology is explored in an empirical study that examines the recognition of personifications in fiction by non-expert readers. A selection of structural properties of personifications is discussed and predictions are formulated regarding which values of which variables are deemed to boost the recognition of personifications. The results suggest that the different types of personification differ in recognizability and that their recognition may be more strongly determined by inherent properties (such as conventionality) than by external factors (such as the presence of a prime). Though the results cannot be unambiguously interpreted, they do indicate some tendencies in the behaviour of non-expert readers and their perceptions of the forms and functions of personification in fiction.

This article presents a quantitative cross-register comparison of the forms and frequency of linguistic metaphor in fiction based on a 45,000-word annotated corpus containing excerpts from 12 contemporary British-English novels sampled from the British National Corpus. The results for fiction are compared to those for three other registers, namely news texts, academic discourse and conversations. The linguistic manifestations of metaphor in the corpus were identified using the MIPVU procedure (Steen et al., 2010), a revised and extended version of the original Metaphor Identification Procedure, or MIP, as developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). Contrary to common expectations, fiction was not the register with the highest number of metaphors, but was situated in between academic discourse and news on the one hand, and conversation on the other. However, it turned out that metaphor signals and direct expressions of metaphor (e.g. simile) were typical of fiction, as has been claimed in the literature (e.g. Goatly, 1997; Lodge, 1977; Sayce, 1953). Based on these quantitative findings, this article will show that fiction does not contain more metaphors than the other registers, but rather, different ones.

The manual annotation of large corpora is time-consuming and brings about issues of consistency. This paper aims to demonstrate how general rules for determining basic meanings can be formulated in large-scale projects involving multiple analysts applying MIP(VU) to authentic data. Three sets of problematic lexical units -chemical processes, colours, and sharp objects -are discussed in relation to the question of how the basic meaning of a lexical unit can be determined when human and non-human senses compete as candidates for the basic meaning; these analyses can therefore be considered a detailed case study of problems encountered during step 3.b. of MIP(VU). The analyses show how these problematic cases were tackled in a large corpus clean-up project in order to streamline the annotations and ensure a greater consistency of the corpus. In addition, this paper will point out how the formulation of general identification rules and guidelines could provide a first step towards the automatic detection of linguistic metaphors in natural discourse.

Studies on mind style have demonstrated how linguistic choices influence the way the narrative world is constructed and consequently understood by the reader. Yet whether and how such mind style can be translated into different languages and cultures remains an under-investigated area of research. The current paper builds on the extensive analysis by Semino and Swindlehurst of the metaphorical mind style created in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by examining how the systematic patterns of metaphor in the novel were translated into Dutch. Focusing on MACHINERY and ICE metaphors, this paper shows that idiomaticity at times appears to be a driving force behind translation decisions that disrupt the stylistic coherence of narrator Bromden's mind style, sacrificing metaphors for the sake of target-language fluency and acceptability. This paper argues that stylistic coherence should take priority, and that translators should steer clear from idiomatic and 'normal' solutions and force the target language and culture to take on these idionsyncratic metaphors to re-create the novel's stylistically coherent mind style. If the metaphors are changed or deleted, this means that the reader of the translation will inevitably be presented with a different narrative world.