Corpus Evidence

Geeraerts (2009: 203) suggests that the cognitive mechanisms of meaning extension, such as metaphor and metonymy, are “now primarily analysed as synchronic phenomena”. Yet, until this point, this review has covered studies that have drawn on dictionary and

thesaurus evidence and perhaps corroborate Philip’s (2003: 1) statement that:

Traditional research into figurative and connotative meaning has tended to focus heavily on etymology in assessing current meaning: something of an anomaly, as it mixes up the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language.

Later, Philip emphasises the importance of remembering that:

the vast majority of language users are ignorant of the etymology of the words and phrases that they use, and for this reason linguists must be wary of an over-reliance on factual, though often trivial, etymological information when trying to shed light on pragmatic meaning. The pragmatic meaning of ‘once in a blue moon’ has of course nothing to do with moons or the colour blue, but draws on the rarity value of this event to describe other rare and unusual events. (ibid.:

172)

Here, Philip identifies how diachronic and synchronic analyses offer two very different takes on metaphor and metonymy; the first reveals the historical motivation behind the semantic change, whereas the second reveals the pragmatic function and current meaning.

Gibbs (1993: 276) illustrates with examples how speaker intuition is rife with

misinterpretations of the development of figurative meanings, and he states that this shows how difficult it is for speakers to have “valid intuitions about metaphoricity in diachronic processes”. As a result, the etymology is considered for every lexical item.

What can be investigated is the current meaning of figurative language. In order to do this real language in current use must be analysed and several scholars have adopted corpora with this aim. Gieroń-Czepczor (2011: 31) acknowledges that opinions regarding the use of corpora can be divided, with many supporters, but also some who are cautious about the limitations of corpora, and those that think they should be used alongside an intuition-based approach. Using the BNC for English and the PWN Corpus (Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe) for Polish, Gieroń-Czepczor (2011) presents a synchronic analysis of six

English and Polish colour terms and presents radial network diagrams for each colour. She concludes that the only shortcoming found with the use of corpora is the overwhelming prevalence of written language, as idiomatic language is characteristic of the spoken register (ibid.: 266). In spite of this, she concludes that corpora are valuable tools in such research, providing access to thousands of citations of naturally occurring language.

Niemeier (1998) carries out a corpus analysis of four BCTs in English, identifying what she describes as the universals of several colours, which are naturally-occurring entities such as blood, grass, the sea and sun (for red, green, blue and yellow, respectively) (ibid.:

126). She presents these in radial network diagrams, but elsewhere warns that such diagrams are “by no means complete because language constantly changes and new meaning extensions are created all the time, some of them getting entrenched and others

not” (2007: 146). However, comparing both of Niemeier’s radial networks for blue, we find them almost identical despite a gap between publications of almost ten years, suggesting any changes are slow to happen (1998: 138; 2007: 150).

She selected the colours red, green, blue and yellow for her study due to their position in the Berlin and Kay evolutionary sequence and adds that it is “no coincidence” that there are a great many more metonymies relating to these colours than to brown, grey, orange, purple and pink. After finding the most metonymies for red, several for blue, whereas not so many for yellow, Niemeier (1998: 143) hints that “we might want to conclude that this fact has a certain significance”. This significance may be a correlation with the UE

sequence, or the relative frequencies of each term. Indeed, in a footnote she points out that black and white have many more entries in the BNC and Collins Cobuild than any of the colours she analyses, suggesting that she was correlating a higher frequency of general use, rather than specifically metonymical use.

Using the SCOTS corpus, Anderson (2011) investigates the literal, idiomatic and metaphorical uses of the colour term red, and its variant forms, in Scots. Using a concordance view can be helpful when a compound has more than one meaning. In the case of red herring, Anderson found that all metaphorical uses were singular whereas the one literal example was plural. She also identifies compounds with degrees of idiomaticity, such as red tops (i.e. tabloid newspapers), red tape, rid bluidit (= red-blooded), red mist, red face and red neck. Furthermore, the advantages of using the SCOTS resource are highlighted, as the correlation between use of language and textual data, such as genre and register, but also sociolinguistic factors, including gender, age, religion and social

background. This provides evidence for only younger speakers using red neck in the sense of embarrassment and of red face being more common in writing than in speech (ibid.: 68).

Where corpus analysis provides an insight into the culture from which the corpus is built, this unique tool opens up the possibility for a closer analysis of groups within cultures.

Of particular relevance to the present study is Philip’s (2011) corpus analysis of colour idioms in the Bank of English (BoE) corpus. One of the main findings from her study is that fixed expressions are subject to variation in everyday language. Philip starts by analysing canonical forms before progressing to highly varied forms, which can be

extremely problematic for retrieval from a corpus designed to allow extraction of specified strings of characters. For example, emphasis can be achieved by substituting a BCT for a

non-BCT of the same hue, or a colour term of a different hue, whereas mitigation can be achieved by substituting a less saturated colour, processes that are also found in the present study. Analysing large amounts of data led Philip to conclude that considering context is extremely important when studying figurative language as meaning extends beyond the boundaries of a single word, or even the whole idiom as a node.

The methodological problems and some potential solutions to the issue of extracting metaphor and metonymy from corpora are suggested by Stefanowitsch (2007). While acknowledging the fact that corpus-based research is “still very much in its initial stages”, he maintains that this should not detract from the impact that this approach has already had on our understanding of metaphor (ibid.: 12). Early text-based studies involved manually searching by reading carefully through the texts in the corpora extracting metaphors found, which has obvious limitations. Searches for source domain vocabulary or target domain vocabulary can be undertaken, or a combination of both. Anderson (2014) adopts some of the methods outlined by Stefanowitsch for the identification and analysis of metaphor in the SCOTS corpus, and suggests that a more automated analysis might be made possible by the HT database. The majority of Anderson’s analysis focuses on a sub-corpus of 250,000 words comprised of interviews with emigrant Scots speakers about reading practices. Given the context of the interviews, metaphors relating to travel, reading and memory emerged. Lists of synonyms were compiled from the HT in order to aid identification of metaphor.