Lesson 1

In the first lesson we established that most students have learned to think of metaphor as a figure of speech or a rhetorical device. We then began to look at M Reddy's presentation of the "Conduit Metaphor" (Resources folder), also known as the transmission model of communication. We stressed that contemporary metaphor theory focuses on metaphor as a cognitive process rather than as a linguistic phenomenon. Paradoxically, however, it is language that grants researchers a "window" on these processes.

Lesson 2

Students went over the questions to L&J in pairs. I circulated and tried to interact as much as possible. We tried to go beyond an intuitive recognition of metaphor and to begin to elaborate verifiable criteria. In the last part of the lesson we began looking at the BYU interface to the BNC to see what support we could find in corpus data for the claims made in Metaphors We Live By. 

Lesson 3

Most of the third lesson was dedicated to students discussing their homework.

Lesson 4

We began as usual with pair work and students comparing their solutions to exercises. A number of problems arose esp. regarding source and target domain and metonymy vs metaphor (Malcolm X). See assignments for extra work on this.

We then introduced the Master Metaphor List (Resources folder). This is a list of conceptual metaphors published by Lakoff and collaborators. Since the list is arranged by target domain, the user needs to know (or guess) the target to discover the source domain, and thus the vocabulary associated with the concrete source. The introduction to the list refers to an index, which, however, I was not able to find and download. An alternative, albeit inadequate, is to search the pdf file using the search box. In any case, we looked briefly at EXTERNAL APPEARANCE IS A COVER, on p. 171 and found a number of examples that included the word “face”, thus the human body as source domain.

The next step is to collect vocabulary related to the human body to verify its use as a source domain for metaphorical mappings. We went to WordNet (Princeton Univ.) and searched “human”. We checked the "direct hyponym" (semantic subordinates, subtypes of human) and found nothing interesting. Then we checked "part meronym" and found “face”. We continued and checked out the meronyms of “face” and found “eye”, “nose”, “cheek” and “jaw” – along with many other words which intuitively did not seem to be candidates for metaphorical extensions).

We then took these words and went to the BNC BYU. We chose “cheek” as a (pretested) test case. Our searches included “cheek” (word), CHEEK (lexeme), CHEEKY, and CHEEKILY. We then went to the 5 min tour (see bar menu) and learned how to carry out different kind of searches: CHEEK [V] -> CHEEK + verb collocations; CHEEK Group by words (below search box) -> Show POS -> distinguish verbs uses from noun uses; Tour -> Compare adj -> click on “small vs little” from table click on “Search” in top left corner and replace “small” and “little” with “cheeky” and “rude”. This gives collocations of both adjectives for comparison. This is an introduction to how we can use WordNet and the BNC to test hypotheses advanced by Conceptual Metaphor Theory.

Finally, I raised the question of assessment, whether a written term paper or an oral exam, both based on reseach projects. We should come to an agreement at the next lesson.

Lesson 5

I began the lesson by announcing that we will need to rethink our scheduling for the course, since contrary to expectations I will be retiring not in the fall but at the end of May, 2019. This news puts us under some pressure. I proposed as the final exam either a term paper or an oral presentation (guidelines in Resources folder). At the end of the lesson, many seemed to express a preference for the paper, though at least one student has written asking for an oral option. I’ve put some reflections in the general CM course block.

I had specifically added a few exercises on metaphor and metonymy to the regular homework assignment for this week, as there seemed to be some uncertainties. We will come back to this in the next lesson, as from the homework turned in it appears that there are still areas of doubt.

After the pair work, I began to report on a case study presented in Deignan’s Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics (see Resources). We looked at the word bank she collected for the metaphor ideas are plants. We then added ‘grow’ and carried out quick searches in a variety of corpora, including a couple that reflect diachronic tendencies (COHA and iWeb).