• Metaphors we read by: Finding metaphorical conceptualizations of reading in web 2.0 book reviews

    Author(s):
    Herrmann Berenike, Thomas C. Messerli (see profile)
    Date:
    2020
    Group(s):
    Digital Humanists
    Subject(s):
    Corpora (Linguistics), Digital humanities, Metaphor
    Item Type:
    Conference paper
    Conf. Title:
    DH2020 Conference
    Conf. Org.:
    The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
    Conf. Loc.:
    online
    Conf. Date:
    July 19–24, 2020
    Tag(s):
    Cultural analytics, metaphor identification, social reading, Corpus linguistics, Theory of metaphor
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/th7s-4742
    Abstract:
    While interdisciplinary research on metaphor is abundant (Eggs, 2000; Semino & Demjén, 2017; Veale et al., 2016), it is still scarce in Digital Humanities. At the intersection of literary studies, corpus stylistics, and digital humanities, we present an exploratory quantitative metaphor analysis of a corpus of German language lay book reviews. Using a deliberately simple methodological approach that operates on seed words for conceptual sources and targets we investigate how reading experiences of literary texts are metaphorically presented by reviewers. We explore a corpus of approx. 1.3 mill. book reviews for metaphors used to conceptualize the target domain READING EXPERIENCE. In line with conceptual metaphor theory, metaphors in language are understood as closely linked to human thought processes and experiences (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, pp. 4–6; Shutova, 2017). They are mappings from typically more basic experiential source domains (LIFE) to more abstract target domains (READING EXPERIENCE), indicated by indirectly used lexis (the words come, end, and road in “we've come to the end of our road”, VUAMC, Steen et al., 2010). Starting from findings on literature reviews in English (Stockwell, 2009; Nuttall & Harrison, 2018) and on reviews in German (Köhler, 1999), we analyze metaphor patterns in social reading networks, with a particular focus on the mapping READING EXPERIENCE IS MOTION. The main aim at this stage is to draw up a first typology of mappings.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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