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Semino, E. (2017) Corpus linguistics and metaphor. In Dancygier, B. (ed.) The

Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 463-76.

Corpus Linguistics and metaphor

Elena Semino (Lancaster University)

1. Introduction: the relevance of Corpus Linguistics to the study of

metaphor

Research on metaphor increasingly exploits, in a variety of ways and for a variety

of purposes, the computer-aided methods developed within Corpus Linguistics.
In this chapter, I begin by briefly introducing Corpus Linguistics and its
relevance to the study of metaphor. In section 2, I introduce the different types of
corpora and corpus linguistic methods that can be applied to the study of
metaphor. In section 3, I discuss the different types of contributions that corpus
methods have made to metaphor theory and analysis. In section 4, I provide a
concrete example of corpus-based research on metaphor, focusing on the use of
metaphor to express the experience of pain. In section 5, I provide some
concluding remarks.

Corpus Linguistics involves the construction of large digital collections of

authentic texts (corpora) and their investigation through dedicated software
tools (e.g. McEnery and Hardie 2012). The methods of Corpus Linguistics were
initially primarily applied to the study of lexis and grammar, but have recently
been extended to a wider range of areas, including discourse analysis, translation
studies and (first and second) language acquisition, as well as other branches of
the humanities and social sciences. Why and in what ways, however, are corpus
methods relevant to the study of metaphor?

In principle, the understanding of any linguistic phenomenon can benefit from

being systematically analysed in large quantities of naturally-occurring data, i.e.
from the kind of analysis that corpus methods make possible. This applies
particularly to any phenomenon that is claimed to be frequent in language, and
that is given centre stage in theory-making at least in part because of its
frequency. Metaphor is such a phenomenon, particularly as it is viewed within
Cognitive Linguistics.

Lakoff and Johnsons 1980 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) based its claim
that metaphor is central to thought on the pervasiveness and conventionality of
metaphor in language. In Lakoff and Johnsons Metaphors We Live By, and in
many subsequent CMT studies, linguistic examples are the main or sole type of
evidence that is provided for the existence of particular conceptual metaphors as
mappings between source and target domains in conceptual structure.
Subsequent developments of CMT, as well as some alternative theoretical
accounts of metaphor in cognition, are also founded, at least in part, on linguistic
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evidence, such as Gradys (1997) theory of primary metaphor and Fauconnier

and Turners (2002) account of metaphor in Blending Theory. The same applies
to much work on metaphor across languages and cultures, and to claims about
the universality or otherwise of particular metaphors (e.g. Kvecses 2005).
The linguistic evidence provided in early work within CMT, however, consisted
of decontextualized examples invented or remembered by the authors
themselves. In contrast, over the last few decades, research on conceptual
metaphors has increasingly made use of authentic data, including by studying
patterns of metaphor use in a variety of electronic corpora. Later in this chapter I
describe in detail the theoretical contributions that this change of methodology
has made possible.

The CMT account of metaphor has also inspired, more or less directly, a large
amount of research on the frequencies, forms and functions of metaphor in
particular texts, text types or discourses. This kind of work varies in the extent to
which it explicitly contributes to metaphor theory, but is firmly based in the
analysis of language use in context. Here corpus methods tend to play an
important role, often in combination with qualitative analysis, as I show below.

2. Different corpora and tools for the corpus-based study of metaphor

Before discussing the contribution made by corpus-based studies to metaphor

theory and analysis, in this section I discuss the different kinds of corpora and
tools that have been exploited in the study of metaphor.

Types of corpora

In Corpus Linguistics, a corpus is generally defined as:

[a] set of machine-readable texts which is deemed an appropriate basis on

which to study a specific set of research questions. The set of texts [] is
usually of a size which defies analysis by hand and eye alone within any
reasonable timeframe. (McEnery and Hardie 2012: 1-2)

A wide range of corpora are used by metaphor scholars, depending on the goals
of the research. Some studies make use of large pre-existing general-purpose
corpora, such as the 15-million-word Italian Reference Corpus (Deignan and
Potter 2004), the 100-million-word British National Corpus (e.g. Stefanowitsch
2006b) and the much larger and growing Bank of English Corpus (e.g. Deignan
2005). These studies tend to make or test generalisations about metaphor use in
a whole (national) language, such as British English, or across two languages,
such as English and Italian.

In contrast, much research on metaphor is concerned with the forms, functions

and implications of metaphor use in particular texts or text types. In the former
case, corpus methods are applied to digital versions of complete existing texts,
such as the Bible and the Koran in Charteris-Black (2004) or Sylvia Plaths Smith
Journal in Demjn (2015). When the focus is metaphor use in a particular genre
or register, the analysts may either study a sub-section of a larger existing
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corpus, or, more frequently, construct their own corpus or corpora. Skorczynska
and Deignan (2006) for example, compare the use of metaphor in two specially
constructed corpora of business research articles (e.g. Management Science) and
articles from business periodicals (e.g. The Economist). Demmen et al. (2015)
analyse the use of Violence metaphors in a dedicated corpus of interviews with
and online forum posts by patients with cancer, family carers and healthcare
professionals. Similarly, LHtes (2014) study of the metaphors and narratives
of New Labour in the UK involved the construction of three comparable corpora
of texts produced by different UK political parties, including manifestoes and
leaders speeches. These specially constructed corpora are seldom larger than a
million words, but are nonetheless big enough to allow generalisations for the
relevant text types.

Finally, the extent of variation in the size of corpora exploited in metaphor

research can best be appreciated by considering studies that lie at opposite ends
of the continuum. Steen et al.s (2010) work, for example, is based on the manual
analysis of four samples from different sections of the British National Corpus
that are small enough to be manually annotated for metaphor (approximately
50,000 words each). In this case, corpus methods were only used to search the
annotations themselves. At the other extreme, Veale (2012) creatively used the
whole World Wide Web as a corpus in order to study, among other things, the
forms and uses of similes in English.

Types of corpus tools

Variation can also be observed in the specific corpus tools that are employed to
find and analyse occurrences of metaphor in corpora of different sizes (see also
Stefanowitsch 2006a: 2-6). In spite of continued progress in automatic metaphor
identification (e.g. Mason 2004, Berber-Sardinha 2010, Neuman et al. 2013),
most corpus-based studies of metaphor involve searching the data for words or
phrases that are likely to be used metaphorically, or to occur in close proximity
to relevant uses of metaphor. Concordancing tools provide each instance of the
search term in the corpus on a separate line, accompanied by the immediately
preceding and following co-text. Some studies involve the concordancing of
expressions that are likely to be used metaphorically at least some of the time in
the data, i.e. vocabulary associated with a particular source domain or vehicle
grouping. Deignan (2005), for example, concordanced animal terms such as
rabbit and squirrel in the Bank of English to study the realisation of the Animal
source domain in English. Semino et al. (2015) concordanced words such as
journey and path in a corpus of online posts by people with cancer, in order to
study the use of Journey metaphors by this particular group of patients.

Where the focus of the research is the metaphorical construction of a particular

topic or experience, on the other hand, the selected search terms realise the
target domain of the potential metaphors. Stefanowitsch (2006b), for example
concordanced in the British National Corpus a set of emotion words such as
happiness and sadness in order to test and refine the claims made about
metaphors for emotions in CMT. In both types of approaches, the co-text of each
occurrence of the search term has to be carefully scrutinised, first in order to see
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whether the search term or some surrounding words are in fact used
metaphorically, and second to identify any patterns that are relevant to the goals
of the study. When specialised corpora are used, it is not uncommon for a small
representative sample of the data to be analysed manually for relevant
metaphorical expressions first, and then for those expressions to be
concordanced in the whole corpus (e.g. Charteris-Black 2004).

Different approaches can be used to identify more open-ended sets of

metaphorical expressions. Some studies involve the concordancing of signalling
expressions (Goatly 1997) or tuning devices (Cameron and Deignan 2003), i.e.
words or phrases that are often found in close proximity to metaphorical, or
generally figurative, uses of language. Cameron and Deignan (2003), for example,
concordance expressions such as sort of and like in order to investigate
metaphor use in corpora of difference sizes. Veale (2012) employed standard
search tools to look for structures associated with similes in the World Wide
Web, including, for example, as as.

A different technique involves the exploitation of semantic annotation tools such

as the USAS tagger, which is part of the online corpus comparison software
Wmatrix (Rayson 2008, http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/). The USAS tool
annotates each word in a corpus with a tag for the main semantic domains it
belongs to. For example, the word war is allocated to the semantic domain
Warfare, defence and the army; weapons. Where a semantic domain in USAS is
likely to correspond to an important metaphorical source domain in a corpus,
this tool can be used to search for open-ended sets of metaphor candidates. This
enables the analyst to go beyond the limitations of traditional lexical
concordances (involving pre-selected words or phrases). For example,
concordancing the word war in a 500,000-word corpus of online writing by
cancer patients (Semino et al. 2015) provides all nine occurrences of that word
in the corpus, which can then be checked for metaphoricity. In contrast,
concordancing the Warfare USAS tag in the same corpus results in 181
occurrences of words that share that tag. This leads to the identification of a
much wider set of war-related metaphors for cancer, including expressions such
as chemo veteran and invaders for cancer cells (see Demmen et al. 2015 and
Semino et al. 2015). In a study of metaphors for mental states in Sylvia Plaths
Smith journal, Demjn (2015) uses the same technique to search both for
vocabulary that relates to potentially relevant source domains (e.g. the USAS
semantic domain Darkness) and for target-domain vocabulary (e.g. the USAS
semantic domain Thought, belief). These kinds of studies also often tend to
involve a first stage where a set of relevant semantic domains is identified via a
manual analysis of a sub-section of the corpus, and a second stage where these
domains are systematically investigated in the whole corpus by means of the
semantic tagger.

Some recent studies additionally incorporate keyness analyses as part of their

methodology. In Corpus Linguistics, keywords are words that are used
unusually frequently (to a statistically significant extent) in ones corpus of data
as compared with a (usually larger) reference corpus. Similarly, for semantically
annotated corpora, a key semantic domain is a domain that includes a much
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higher number of tokens in ones corpus of data than in a reference corpus

(Rayson 2008). Particular expressions or semantic domains do not have to be
key in a corpus to be of interest for the purposes of metaphor analysis, as not all
instances of that expression/domain may be metaphorically used in the corpus
under analysis, the reference corpus, or both (e.g. news data is always likely to
include frequent literal references to wars). However, when a metaphorically
used expression or domain is key in a corpus in statistical terms, strong claims
can be made about the dominance of that particular kind of metaphor in that
data. For example, in LHtes (2014) New Labour corpus, both the words tough
and strong and the USAS semantic tag Tough/strong are key as compared with a
corpus of Labour texts from an earlier period. This suggests that metaphors to do
with physical strength are systematically used in the New Labour corpus to
counter the partys earlier soft image in British politics. Similarly, some
signalling devices for metaphoricity are keywords in Partington et al.s (2013)
corpus of opinion pieces in British newspapers, as compared with a corpus of
reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. This finding is used to support a more
general claim that humorous metaphors and similes are much more frequent in
the former corpus than the latter.

A few studies also make use of collocation tools for metaphor analysis. The
collocates of a word are words that are used unusually frequently in close
proximity to that word. Collocations can be calculated on the basis of different
measures of statistical significance (see Brezina et al. 2015). LHte (2014), for
example, consider the collocates of the metaphorically used word tough in her
New Labour corpus, in order to see what policy areas and initiatives are
described in these terms in her data (e.g. the New Labour slogans tough on
crime). Semino (2008) considers the collocates of the adjective rich in the British
National Corpus to test Lakoffs (1993) claim that the expression a rich life is
evidence of the existence of a conventional conceptual metaphor A PURPOSEFUL
LIFE IS A BUSINESS.

Having discussed the types of corpora and tools that can be employed for
metaphor analysis, I now turn to the main contributions that this kind of
approach has made to the study of metaphor.

3. Contributions of corpus-based studies of metaphor

Corpus Linguistics is an approach to the study of language that is not associated

with any general or specific theory. However, the use of corpus methods rests on
the assumption that actual linguistic behaviour is not only worth studying
systematically, but also needs to be accounted for by any theoretical model of
language. As such, Corpus Linguistics is particularly consistent with the usage-
based models of language that have been proposed within Cognitive Linguistics.
When it comes to metaphor in particular, corpus methods have been used to
contribute to metaphor theory and analysis in a number of ways. In this section, I
start from some general contributions, especially concerning CMT. I then
consider the findings that corpus methods have led to in studies that approach
metaphor from historical, cross-cultural, discoursal and practical perspectives.
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General implications for metaphor theory

In the first book-length study of metaphor from a Corpus Linguistic perspective,

Deignan (2005) provided evidence from the Bank of English corpus to support
the most general claims made in CMT, especially concerning the frequency of
conventional metaphorical expressions, and the ways in which they form
patterns that can be taken as evidence for particular conventional conceptual
metaphors. However, Deignan also showed systematically how the de-
contextualised linguistic examples used in CMT are often not sufficiently
representative of actual language use to be cited as evidence for claims about
conceptual metaphors. In addition, Deignan used corpus methods to reveal
patterns of metaphor use that were not considered or accounted for in
(conceptual) metaphor theory, at least up to that point. These include, for
example, some systematic associations between particular source domains and
linguistic metaphors belonging to different word classes, as well as the fact that
some words have different conventional metaphorical senses for different
morphological inflections (e.g. rock as a singular noun vs. rocks as a plural noun).
Deignan also found evidence for a greater influence of target domains in
metaphorical mappings than suggested by Lakoffs (1993) Invariance
Hypothesis.

Some subsequent corpus-based studies have questioned or refined specific

claims about conceptual metaphors. Semino (2008) finds no evidence in the
British National Corpus for Lakoffs (1993) claim that the expression rich life is a
realisation of the conceptual metaphor A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A BUSINESS. Rather,
corpus evidence is provided for a different conventional pattern that accounts
for the expression rich life alongside other metaphorical uses of rich, such as rich
soil and rich culture. Stefanowitsch (2006b) conducts a systematic analysis of the
metaphorical expressions that co-occur with emotion words in the British
National Corpus. He provides broad support for earlier claims about emotion
metaphors in CMT (Kvecses 2000). However, he also reveals patterns that were
not discussed in previous studies, and provides information about the
frequencies of different metaphors in British English, as represented in the
corpus. Stefanowitschs (2006b) study also empirically addresses the question of
whether there are emotion-specific metaphors, and what metaphors can be
described as such.

Studies such as Musolff (2006) in contrast, use corpus evidence to make

suggestions about the level of generality at which claims about conceptual
metaphors are best made. Musolff analyses the use of metaphor in a bilingual
English-German corpus of news reports about the EU. He finds that the use of
metaphor in the corpus is best accounted for not in terms of mappings involving
broad conceptual domains such as Marriage, but rather in terms of more specific
scenarios, such as End-of-honeymoon and Adultery.

More generally, corpus-based studies of metaphor tend to reveal linguistic

patterns that are difficult to account for in terms of CMT, and of metaphor theory
more generally. For example, as mentioned above, the singular noun rock tends
to have a positive meaning when used metaphorically (the rock on which society
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is built), while the plural rocks tends to have a negative meaning (The marriage
has been on the rocks for a while) (Deignan 2005: 158-9). Furthermore, some
Animal metaphors seem to occur only as nouns (e.g. cow as a derogatory term);
others only occur as verbs (e.g. horsing around); yet others occur both as nouns
and verbs, but not necessarily with the same meaning (e.g. racist pigs and pigging
out on food) (Deignan 2005: 153). In German, Boot (boat) and Schiff (ship)
have similar literal meanings but different conventional metaphorical uses: Boot
is used in expressions such as being in the same boat, or to describe a place as
having no space for newcomers; in contrast, Schiff tends to be used as part of
metaphorical descriptions of difficult enterprises (Zinken 2007).

Such findings from corpus-based studies have considerable theoretical

implications. In her 2005 book, Deignan comments that [t]he data discussed so
far suggests that each linguistic metaphor has a life of its own (Deignan 2005:
166). On the basis of patterns such as Boot vs. Schiff in German, Zinken (2007)
proposes the notion of discourse metaphors form-meaning pairings that
develop in communication as part of a conceptual pacts among interlocutors,
and that constitute a mid-point between novel metaphors and fully
conventionalised ones. Other metaphor scholars explain these findings in terms
of Dynamics Systems Theory (e.g. Cameron 2011). From a dynamic systems
perspective, the meanings and functions of metaphorical expressions arise from
the dynamic interaction of lexico-grammatical, semantic, cognitive, pragmatic
and affective factors in actual contexts of communication (e.g. Cameron and
Deignan 2006, Gibbs forthcoming). Within this account, conceptual metaphors
are only one of the factors involved in the development of metaphorical
meanings, including conventional ones. Johansson Falck and Gibbs (2012)
specifically show the relevance of embodied simulations associated with
particular words as one of these interacting factors. Like Zinken (2007), they
consider a pair of words (road and path) that have similar literal meanings, but
different metaphorical meanings. Corpus evidence from the British National
Corpus shows that path is typically used metaphorically to refer to ways of living,
and often to suggest (potential) difficulties. In contrast, road tends to be used
metaphorically to describe purposeful activities. Johansson Falck and Gibbs
compare the corpus findings with the mental imagery that people reported in a
questionnaire about their experiences with paths and roads. The triangulation of
participant responses and corpus findings suggest that peoples embodied
experiences with the entities referred to by path and road can explain the
(different) metaphorical meanings that the two words have in the corpus.

Corpus-based findings on historical, cultural and register variation in

metaphor use

Corpus methods are also contributing to the study of variation in metaphor use
in the history of a language, across languages, and in different types of texts.

The availability of historical corpora of English in particular has led to several

diachronic studies of metaphor. As Tissari (2001: 238) puts it, these studies
show both stability and change in metaphor use over time. Tissari (2001)
compares some of the central metaphors for love as an emotion in corpora
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representing, respectively, Early Modern English and Present-Day English. An

analysis of concordances for the string love in both corpora showed that the
main broad source domains that are applied to love appear to be the same
(Containment, Amount and Exchange). However, some differences can be
observed in how these source domains are realised. For example, Exchange
metaphors seem to be realised more often by words associated with agriculture
in the Early Modern English corpus than in the Present-Day English corpus. This
reflects a decrease in the cultural centrality of agriculture over time. Similar
findings arise from studies that exploit the Historical Thesaurus of English to
study conceptual mappings across the history of the language. Alexander and
Bramwell (2014) show, for example, how the metaphorical description of wealth
in terms of large body mass (e.g. fat and the now archaic cob) has decreased over
time, as the positive association of looking well-fed have waned. These studies
often have broader theoretical implications. In a diachronic analysis of
metaphors for intelligence in the Historical Thesaurus, for example, Allan (2008)
finds evidence to support the importance of the metonymic basis of many
conventional metaphors. Some of her findings also question the claim that
metaphors tend to map concrete experiences onto abstract ones. For example,
folk etymology may suggest that dull as a description of lack of intelligence
involves a concrete-to-abstract mapping from the source domain of (lack of)
physical sharpness. However, historical evidence reveals that the word was first
used for lack of intelligence, and thus suggests that it is the more concrete
physical use that was derived from the one that relates to intellectual abilities
(Allan 2008: 186).

Many corpus-based cross-linguistic studies of metaphor have built on and

extended the work of Kvecses and others on the relationship between
metaphor and culture, broadly conceived (e.g. Deignan and Potter 2004,
Charteris-Black 2003, Chung 2008). These studies also tend to reveal both
similarities and differences in the metaphors used in languages associated with
different cultures. The similarities often confirm the embodied basis of many
metaphors. The differences emphasize cultural relativity, not least in perceptions
of the body itself. Sim (2011), for example, builds on Charteris-Blacks (2001)
research on English to compare the metaphorical use of blood in corpora of
Hungarian and American English. She finds that the main target themes for
blood metaphors are the same: Emotion and Essence. However, there are
differences in the connotations and frequencies of different metaphorical
expressions involving blood. For example, the expression in cold
blood/hidegvrrel is always negative in American English but equally split
between positive and negative uses in Hungarian. In Hungarian, hidegvrrel is
also particularly frequent in sports reports. More generally, Sim finds evidence
of within-culture variation by comparing blood metaphors in each section of each
corpus.

Indeed, a large number of studies have used corpus methods to study the forms
and functions of metaphor in different text-types, including news reports (e.g.
Musolff 2004; Koller 2004), political speeches (Charteris-Black 2005), religious
texts (Charteris-Black 2004), and so on. These studies often tend to aim to
answer questions that pertain to those text-types and their contexts of use,
 9

rather than or in addition to furthering metaphor theory. For example, Koller

(2004) shows how the dominant Sports and War metaphors in reports about the
economy are both closely linked to each other and a reflection of a sexist bias.
Charteris-Black (2012) uses corpus methods to analyse metaphorical
expressions in a large corpus of interviews with people with depression. Among
other things, he shows that men and women tend to use similar metaphors, but
suggests that the few differences that do emerge may have relevance in the
therapeutic process. More generally, these studies reveal the potential pitfalls
involved in making generalisations about metaphor in language and cognition
without taking into account variation at the level of speakers/writers, registers,
genres and discourses (see also OHalloran 2007, Deignan et al. 2013).

A more specific contribution of corpus-based studies of metaphor in particular

text-types is the systematic investigation of the functions of metaphors in
discourse. LHtes (2014) shows the way in which metaphor is used to project a
political partys new identity in a corpus of New Labour texts in the UK from
1997 to 2007. Partington et al. (2013: 131ff) concordance tuning devices in a
corpus of reviews in British broadsheets to show the ways in which creative,
humorous metaphors and similes are used to entertain the reader. These
expressions tend to involve incongruous comparisons and proper names of
various kinds, and to rely heavily on the readers cultural knowledge (e.g. a sort
of Goldilocks on crack and an unexpected, juicy cross between meaty liquorice and
Noggin the Nogs bum). Veales (2012) study of similes on the World Wide Web
reveals, among other things, how certain simile structures tend to be used
creatively and humorously. For example, the structure about as as is shared
by many ironic similes, especially when the adjective following the first as is
positive (e.g. about as useful as a chocolate teapot).

Corpus-based approaches to particular figurative phenomena within specific

genres can also have broad relevance for metaphor theory. This is the case with
Dorsts (2015) work on similes in fiction and two recent studies on metaphor
clusters and mixed metaphors (Kimmel 2010, Semino forthcoming). In
particular, Semino (forthcoming) shows how people often use the label mixed
metaphor to describe the use, in close proximity, of metaphorical expressions
that actually involve the same broad source domain, such as the source domain
of Music in: to keep things on a different note, instead of the same record getting
played over and over again. This suggests that people are particularly sensitive to
contrasts between nearby metaphors when those metaphors are similar enough
to each other for their differences to be consciously noticed.

Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and practice

Finally, some corpus-based approaches to metaphor have implications for

practice in different areas. Skorczynska and Deignans (2006) comparison of a
corpus of business research articles and a corpus of business periodicals articles
revealed differences that are relevant to the choice of teaching materials for non-
native speakers who are preparing for higher education courses in English.
Skorczynska and Deignan suggest that the use of magazines such as The
Economist is not sufficient to prepare students for reading academic papers on
 10

business and economics. Skorczynska (2010) similarly found that the metaphors
in a Business English textbook differ considerably, both in kind and frequency,
from those found in a corpus of specialist business articles. These studies have
implications for the choice of teaching materials in English for Specific Purposes,
as well as for a further appreciation of variation in metaphor use depending on
audience and text-type.

A corpus-based study of metaphors for cancer and the end of life at Lancaster
University, in contrast, has implications for communication in healthcare. The
study involved a combination of manual and computer-aided analysis of a 1.5-
million corpus of interviews with and online posts by patients with advanced
cancer, family carers and healthcare professionals. A variety of patterns of
metaphor use were identified by means of a combination of lexical and semantic
concordances. Among other things, the analysis showed differences among
patients and healthcare professionals in the use of Violence metaphors such as
fighting cancer, with patients using them significantly more frequently than
healthcare professionals. The study also showed that, as many have argued (e.g.
Sontag 1979), violence-related metaphors can be detrimental to patients morale
and self-esteem, as when a patient with a terminal diagnosis says I feel such a
failure that I am not winning this battle. However, for a substantial minority of
patients, these metaphors can be empowering, as when a patient says Cancer and
the fighting of it is something to be proud of (see Demmen et al. 2015, Semino et
al. 2015). These findings suggest a degree of individual variation in the use of
metaphor for illness that is relevant to communication training and practice in
healthcare (see Demjn and Semino forthcoming).

Overall, this section has shown the variety of contributions that corpus-based
approaches can make to the understanding of metaphor in language and
cognition. In the next section I provide a more extensive example of corpus-
based analyses of metaphor in relation to physical illness.

4. Corpus approaches to metaphor and pain

The experience of physical pain is well known to be difficult to articulate in

language (e.g. Scarry 1985). English, for example, has relatively few words that
specialize in the description of pain sensations, and all of them are quite general
(e.g. pain, painful, hurt, ache, aching, sore). This poses a challenge in healthcare,
particularly when pain becomes chronic: in that context, diagnosis and treatment
rely to a significant extent on the sufferers ability to express their pain, and on
healthcare professionals sensitivity to patients descriptions. It is also well
known, including among clinicians, that figurative language is an important
resource in articulating pain sensations. In the words of a consultant at the
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London:

Attempts to truly describe pain indeed appear as difficult as they are

frustrating, yet the need to communicate is overwhelming, and I suggest
that the only option available is the resort to analogy (w)hether by
means of metaphor or simile . (Schott 2004: 210)
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Kvecses (2008) discusses the main metaphors used in English to convey pain
experiences, from the perspective of CMT. He observes that pain is
conceptualized metaphorically in terms of its potential causes (Kvecses 2008:
28). More precisely, pain sensations tend to be expressed metonymically or
metaphorically in terms of causes of damage to the body. For example, the
expression a burning pain is used metonymically when the pain is caused by skin
contact with a flame, and metaphorically when the pain does not result from
contact with sources of heat, but can be compared with the sensation caused by
such contact (e.g. a burning pain caused by acidity in the stomach). Kvecses
(2008) proposes a number of specific conceptual metaphors that are all part of
this broad pattern:

PAIN IS A SHARP OBJECT A sharp stab of pain made her sit back down.
PAIN IS A TORMENTING ANIMAL A massive killing pain came over my right eye [...]
I clawed at my head trying to uproot the fiendish talons from their iron
grip.
PAIN IS FIRE Pain is fire that can devour the whole body.
(Kvecses 2008: 28; emphasis in original)

The connection with metonymy emphasizes the main motivation for such
metaphors. The most prototypical and intersubjectively accessible kind of pain
results from damage to bodily tissues, as in the case of cuts, burns, etc. Other
types of more subjective and invisible pain (e.g. migraine) are described
metaphorically in terms of properties or processes that cause damage to the
body (e.g. a splitting headache).

In Semino (2010) I discuss these metaphors from the perspective of theoretical

and empirical work on embodied simulation. I also point out that language-based
diagnostic tools for the diagnosis of pain also heavily rely on linguistic
metaphors that draw from a wide range of causes of bodily damage. The McGill
Pain Questionnaire (Melzack 1975), for example, requires patients to choose
appropriate descriptors from a list that includes words such as stabbing, burning,
drilling etc. In the same study, I also provide corpus evidence to support and
refine Kvecsess (2008) claims about conventional conceptual metaphors in
English. The top 65 collocates of the word pain in the British National Corpus
include eight expressions that have literal, basic meanings to do with causes of
bodily damage: searing, sharp, stabbing, lanced, seared, stabbed, stinging,
burning.1 The corpus data provides evidence for a conventional conceptual
metaphor that can be expressed as PAIN IS CAUSE OF PHYSICAL DAMAGE, which can in
fact be seen as a primary metaphor, in the terms used by Grady (1997). The
metaphors proposed by Kvecses (2008) for different kinds of bodily damage
can be seen as specific-level variants of this more general and basic metaphor
(see also Lascaratou 2007 for metaphors and metonymies for pain in Greek). In
addition, an analysis of concordance lines for pain shows that some expressions

1Collocates of pain were computed on the basis of log-likelihood (Dunning 1993) and within a
window span of one word to the left and one word to the right of the search string.
 12

that are included in the McGill Pain Questionnaire are never or seldom used in
the corpus to describe pain sensations (e.g. taut). This may cast some doubts on
the decision to include such expressions in the questionnaire.

Corpus methods can be further exploited to investigate how chronic pain

sufferers use figurative language creatively to express particularly intense and
distressing experiences. As an example, I searched for the structure feels like in
a 2.9-million-word corpus of contributions to an English language online forum
for sufferers of Trigeminal Neuralgia.2 Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN) is a rare but
distressing condition that causes unpredictable pain in the face of such intensity
that all aspects of the sufferers life can be affected. The search for feels like in
the corpus returned 254 occurrences of the expression. As I expected, most
instances function as a tuning device, i.e. they introduce a simile that describes
the writers experience of a TN attack, such as the following (NB: original
spellings have been retained but proper names have been changed):

1. feels like needles poking my eyes and ears

2. sometimes it feels like I am covered in insects and this can be more

distressing than the pain

3. At the moment, it feels like someone of considerable weight (not you

jenny lol) is standing on the side of my face, wearing stilletto's whilst
pouring red hot liquid into my ear. When I get the bolts it feels like
someone has decided that I deserve to be cattle prodded!

Example (1) is a relatively creative instantiation of the conventional tendency to

describe pain in terms of the insertion of sharp objects into the body (cf.
Kvecsess 2008 PAIN IS A SHARP OBJECT). Example 2 does not involve pain as such,
but an uncomfortable symptom of TN that is described as more distressing than
the pain itself. The expression covered in insects primarily conveys a physical
sensation, but also has associations of repulsion and disgust, which can account
for the distressing nature of the experience. Example (3) is one of many
examples in the corpus where different causes of physical damage (pressure,
penetration with a pointed object, heat, electric shock) are combined into a rich,
dynamic and creative metaphorical scenario (see also Deignan et al. 2013: 279ff).
This kind of description goes well beyond the single-word options included in
language-based diagnostic tools such as the McGill Pain Questionnaire.

A systematic analysis of conventional and creative figurative descriptions of

pain, in both general and specialized corpora, can therefore be used both to
assess the validity of existing pain questionnaires and to inform the creation of
future language-based diagnostic tools.

2 I am grateful to the UK Trigeminal Neuralgia Association for allowing me access to their online
forum.
 13

5. Conclusions

Corpus approaches have made and are continuing to make a variety of important
contributions to the study of metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon.
These contributions involve not just metaphor theory, but also the
understanding of communication in a variety of contexts, as well as practice in
areas such as education and healthcare. The chapter has also shown the
ingenuity and methodological eclecticism involved in corpus-based studies of
metaphors. Researchers do not just use a variety of corpus tool, but do so
creatively, in order to identify the widest possible variety of potential
metaphorical expressions in their data. An initial manual analysis often provides
the springboard for computer-aided analysis. Even more importantly, decisions
about metaphoricity and about the meanings and functions of metaphors in the
data involve detailed qualitative analyses of the output of corpus tools.

Two final points are in order, which I have not been able to do justice to in the
course of the chapter. First, experimental approaches to the study of metaphor
(e.g. Bowdle and Gentner 2005, Casasanto 2008) can benefit from using as
stimulus materials authentic and, ideally, frequent linguistic expressions:
corpora are a potentially useful source of such materials. Second, any large-scale
linguistic investigation will come across metaphorical uses of language.
Therefore, corpus-based studies of language generally can benefit from, or
possibly even require, the findings and insights that are developed by metaphor
scholars. It is no coincidence, for example, that metaphor is the topic of one of
the guides that followed the creation of the first corpus-based dictionary of
English, the Collins Cobuild dictionary (Deignan 1995). No systematic corpus-
based investigation of word meanings and discourse patterns in any language
can avoid dealing with the role of metaphor in the lexicon and in language use.

Future corpus linguistic research on metaphor is likely to involve the use of ever
more sophisticated corpus and computational tools, the analysis of larger and
more varied corpora and further theoretical, analytical and practical advances.

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