Using Dictionaries in Metaphor Identification

Abstract

Metaphor has been the focus of cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, and metaphor identification lays a solid foundation for metaphor research. Since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) proposed the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, much attention has been given to the conceptual and cognitive dimensions of metaphor, leaving linguistic dimension secondary. However, when MIP was introduced in 2007, which aims to identify metaphorically used lexical units in natural discourses, metaphor researchers have developed a systematic and reliable methodology for identifying linguistic metaphor instead of working with intuition and subjective criteria, which enables them to focus their research on different levels-linguistic forms, conceptual structure and cognitive processing. As MIP requires metaphor analysts to work through five steps, in which they depend heavily on dictionaries to determine lexical units and specify the basic and contextual senses, the use of dictionaries becomes the critical element in MIP. The Pagglejaz Group chose Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners a reference, while MIPVU, the elaborated version of MIP, used Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and Oxford English Dictionary apart from Macmillan dictionary. The author, by demonstrating the use of different types of dictionaries in MIP, tries to show that together with learners’ dictionaries, historical dictionaries, collocation dictionaries and specialized dictionaries can also be used for cross reference to guarantee the reliability of linguistic metaphor identification.