[Corpora-List] Metaphor identification

[Gill Philip]

Dear Muhammed,

the availability of software to aid metaphor extraction is
language-dependent, with English being the best-provisioned.  And of course
the success or usefulness of any system depends on which definition of
metaphor you are using, e.g. X is Y metaphors; vehicle terms (c.f. Cameron
2010); MIP (Pragglejaz 2007) or MIPVU (Steen et al 2010), or something
else. So first of all, decide what you want to class as "metaphor", and
only then start looking for software that can help you locate it.

There are several options available, but none are fully automatic - they
will let you extract preliminary data but you will have to refine it by
hand. If your data is in English (or one of the other supported languages)
you can try using WMatrix  (ucrel.lacs.ac.uk/) to identify contrasting
semantic domains - this is a popular option for metaphor scholars, and
seems to come up with reliable and convincing results.
You might also have a look at the metaphor-tagged BNC-baby to see if the
way it was constructed can be of use for your purposes.
http://www2.let.vu.nl/oz/metaphorlab/metcor/documentation/home.html  ( it
adheres to the MIP / MIPVU view that metaphor is anything that isn't the
"central or basic" meaning of a word, though, which means it counts
prepositions as metaphors too. You may or may not find that useful for your
purposes)

If the language of your corpus is not English, you may find things a bit
more difficult. I had some success with italian data, extracting key-word
listings and grouping them semantically (by hand) then comparing
content-word groupings to the key words (Philip 2010, 2012). This procedure
can only work if your corpus is domain-specific, i.e. if the topics it
contains are restricted in scope, because only in that was is it possible
to identify non-topic related vocabulary as potentially metaphorical.

As a last resort, you could always read your corpus, manually tag it, then
work from the tags. But I guess you're trying to avoid that option.

hope this helps,
Gill

Gill Philip. 2010. Metaphorical keyness in specialised corpora. In: Marina
Bondi and Mike Scott (eds.), Keyness in Texts
.<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/scl.41>(pp. 185–204)

Gill Philip. 2012. Locating metaphor candidates in specialized corpora
using raw frequency and keyword lists. In: Fiona MacArthur, José Luis
Oncins-Martínez, Manuel Sánchez-García and Ana María Piquer-Píriz (eds.),
Metaphor in Use: Context, culture, and communication. (pp. 85–106)



On 16 May 2014 18:18, Asim Rai <masimrai at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Fellows
> I am Dr Asim form Pakistan.
> I am currently working on a research where I need to identify the
> metaphors in my corpus of approximately 2.5 million words.
> Is there any software which may help in Metaphor identification
>
> Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Best
> Dr Muhammad Asim Mahmood
>
> _______________________________________________
> UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
>


-- 
*********************************
Dr. Gill Philip
Università degli Studi di Macerata
Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione, dei Beni Culturali, e del Turismo
Piazzale L. Bertelli
Contrada Vallebona
62100 Macerata
Italy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20140516/128f00be/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora