Defining Semantic and Prosodic Tools for the Analysis of Live Metaphor Uses in Spoken Corpora
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Abstract
Considering metaphors as hypercoding elements in a genetic outlook, a corpus of twenty six scripted interviews, in British and American English and in French was labelled morphosyntactically and with lsa (latent semantic analysis) coefficients which assess semantic “distance” between words (grammatical words included) and the general topic of the discourse — music in our case. The corpus was first hand-searched then searched by XSLT stylesheets for potentially live metaphors using the lsa tags.
Metaphors in oral discourse differ from those in written discourse in more than one way: They are more spontaneous when innovative, less contrived and linked are endowed with a recognisable intonation. The scrutiny of all the live metaphors trawled from the corpus was carried out and resulted in the establishment of prosodic patterns for assessing metaphoricity. The pattern is not live-metaphor specific, but used along with other factors such as semantic distance, being a good enough indicator for both languages. As a case study, [MUSIC IS A PATH/JOURNEY] metaphor uses are looked into.
An intended live metaphor corresponds to a specific attitude and emotion on the speaker’s part. Maturity and Tonus (Piot 2002) are two concepts that can account for the prosodic contours. This feature may be added to the pattern bundle for metaphors which Lynne Cameron and Alice Deignan have coined Metaphoreme. Establishing what is metaphorically alive is a fruitful way of contrasting how cognitive models at play in metaphor are translated in oral discourse and may be seen as the ecology of metaphors, seeing how they coexist in their cognitive milieu. French, English and American radio stations, France Musique, Radio 3, and NPR provided material to test with some success the efficiency of the prosodic template.
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