The process of data collection is based on the cognitive model where ST data were collected according to the three patterns of conceptual metaphor introduced in Chapter II (2.4.2). Over the past five years, the cognitive model of metaphor analysis was subject to an extensive discussion and development. Before Cognitive Theory, research about the metaphoric language of a given text, for example a Shakespearean text, used to be inspired by the researchers’ focus on finding a connection between the topic of the research, on the one hand,
and the theme of the play as well as the individual style of the writer, on the other hand. Towards the end of the twentieth century, certain voices started to emerge calling for an impartial investigation of metaphor in Shakespeare irrespective of its contribution to the major theme of the play, and regardless of whether there is anything “distinctively Shakespearean” (Thompson 1990: 676) about the metaphors under consideration.
According to Thompson, researching metaphor in Shakespeare should be done by conducting a philosophical linguistic analysis of “short decontextualized examples” (ibid., 673). Referring to his experience with Ann Thompson on metaphor analysis in Shakespeare,
Meaning, and Metaphor (1987), Thompson realized that “the types of analysis developed
within philosophy and linguistics” (1990: 673) give “a kind of access to the Shakespearean text which actually greatly clarifies (our) sense of what makes the writing so striking” (ibid.). He also drew a distinction between two strategies for dealing with metaphor in Shakespeare: the first is what he referred to as ‘macro-metaphoric’ analysis which is a classical critical
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strategy concerned with detecting the presence of a central metaphor that prevails within a text and enriches its theme (metaphoric structure); and the second is ‘micro-metaphoric’ analysis which deals with every single metaphor within the text as a separate distinctive case that merits a special analysis regardless of the central topic of the play.
For Thompson, the macro-level analysis of metaphor cannot provide an objective study of Shakespearean metaphors or the metaphors of any text in general because it deals with the different metaphors of the examined text as being “under the control of organized by, founded on a metaphor” (1990: 675). Criticizing Ralph Berry for his macro-analysis of metaphor in The Shakespearean Metaphor (1978), Thompson argued for understanding the limitations of the macro-metaphoric approach as being too general and subjective (1990: 674), for two reasons: first, it does not reflect the depth and unity of the text as it does not deal with all the variety of metaphors which play a role in an unbiased understanding of the theme; second, it presents a partial picture of the theme making it subject to the critic’s personal interpretations, instead of reconstructing it from all its constituent parts. As an alternative to the macro-level of metaphor analysis in Shakespeare, Thompson introduced the notion of “micrometaphorics” (ibid., 672), arguing that it is possible and natural for different metaphors to “co-exist” (ibid., 674) within a certain text and that dealing with the diversity of metaphors rather than the hegemony of a single metaphor is indispensable for a comprehensive analysis of the studied text:
“A great deal of text must be marginalized if we are to have a core; the ‘single angle of incidence’ provides a view of the play which relegates a surprisingly large area of the object in hand to the status of its invisible back. By Comparison, the micrometaphoric approach allows one to rotate the object freely and to allow any feature of the ‘marvelous structure’ to catch the eye.” (ibid., 677)
In an advanced stage, some scholars emphasized the importance of Cognitive Theory in conducting an objective research about the functions of metaphor within a text and called for adopting the model of Conceptual Metaphor analysis in researching metaphor empirically.
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One of the early cognitive approaches to the empirical study of metaphor within a text is Schmitt’s notion of “systematic metaphor analysis” (2005: 369), which was raised as a “qualitative research procedure” (ibid., 359). Systematic metaphor analysis is a technique which was proposed for conducting qualitative research by extracting the metaphoric patterns of a certain text and interpreting its content based on a methodical analysis of the conceptual behaviour and function of those metaphors. Schmitt proposed a methodology for data collection and analysis according to two phases which sum up what takes place during the empirical research process: deconstruction and reconstruction. These two phases comprise several steps: (a) identifying the target area, i.e. the conceptual field, for metaphor analysis (JEALOUSY, AUTHORITY, LOVE, etc.); (b) collecting patterns of linguistic metaphors which describe the selected topic (idioms, for example); (c) scanning academic literature for metaphorical conceptualizations about the topic in order to have an overview of cultural and pragmatic factors that play a role in the uses of the relevant metaphor in discourse; and (d) reconstructing the collected metaphors by grouping them under a certain concept which is a shared TD or SD for the collected metaphoric patterns (ibid., 373).
Another cognitive approach to data identification and extraction in an empirical research on metaphor within a text is the “Metaphor Identification Procedure” or MIP which was introduced by the Pragglejaz Group as a reliable method for identifying the metaphoric uses of words in discourse (2007: 1). In an article about the procedures of identifying the metaphors of a text for the purpose of academic research, the Pragglejaz scholars explained their method of extracting data of a metaphoric nature based on the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor. The MIP method adopted a bottom-to-top investigative approach in collecting metaphors; i.e. starting on the level of the linguistic structure then extracting its conceptual pattern as outlined by the Cognitive Linguistic School, which reduced metaphors to the basic model TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN (TD IS SD).
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The article discussed factors that play a key role in selecting metaphoric data such as context, research purpose as well as personal intuitions, providing researchers in the field of metaphor analysis with feasible tools that allow them to apply the identification procedure in varied contexts of research and different interdisciplinary studies. Also, the Pragglejaz Group highlighted the potential difficulties and challenges that researchers face in their application of the cognitive approach to metaphor analysis, and the set of procedures (Metaphor Identification Procedures MIP) they introduced to identify and extract metaphoric patterns from a text emphasized the importance of objectivity and distancing oneself from intuitive interpretations, as clarified in the following passage:
“Identifying metaphorically used words in a large text may be something that all metaphor scholars have already intuitions about, but justifying those intuitions, and being consistent in how they are applied to individual words in contexts, is far trickier than many would imagine.” (Pragglejaz Group 2007: 36)
Trying to present a flexible and practical set of procedures, the Pragglejaz Group explained the three main aspects which need to be covered during the data collection process comprising: sources and tools, processing steps (selection and coding) and the analysis criteria. These aspects were covered in a form which was introduced by the group for reporting on the details of the MIP process including: text details, text recipients, lexical units decision, sources, coding decision, analysis details, additional analyses and the results of the analysis (ibid., 14). The form presented by the group is comprehensive in that it covers a great deal of what happens during the research process. The group’s strategy for data identification was based on a contextual criterion, which is a determining factor in extracting metaphor in the literary genre as literary texts do “not establish a contrast between a contextual meaning and a basic meaning for their lexical units” (ibid., 24). In 2010, the
Pragglejaz Group amended their method of the MIP process trying to bring it close to a descriptive analysis that helps researchers avoid a possible loss of data which is very likely to
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happen should one follow a top-to-bottom approach to data collection, as clarified in the following paragraph:
“When an inductive approach is followed, this does not mean that all we know about conceptual metaphors should be ignored, for that would be throwing out the baby with the bath water. What it does mean is that we need an explicit, systematic, and reliable tool for finding linguistic expressions that may be related to metaphor in conceptual structure, and that this tool should at least lead to the inclusion of the obvious cases which have been so successfully revealed by the deductive approach that is characteristic of the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphor.” (Steen et al 2010: 769)
The amended MIP method described metaphor as “a relational term” (ibid., 771) stressing the significance of contextual pointers in processing the conceptual content of the examined metaphor. Accordingly, the identification and explication of metaphor is governed by a number of factors and contexts such as the immediate linguistic context, the socio-linguistic context and the cultural context. The guiding reasoning behind contextualizing the conceptual content of a given metaphor is the assumption that what is metaphorical for a certain social group or text receiver might not be metaphorical for another or might involve a different metaphorical content. The academic group explained their amended technique stating that the “main additions and alterations to MIP involve the two following features:
1. The detailed explication of many aspects of the decision-making process regarding lexical units and the identification of metaphorically used lexical units;
2. the addition of new sections on other forms of metaphor (…) novel compounds and signals for metaphor.” (ibid., 774)
In the first part of the empirical study on data extraction from the STs, I adopted the amended MIP approach to data identification and collection. To illustrate, I worked through each play from beginning to end, collecting metaphoric linguistic units, deconstructing them into their conceptual components of SD and TD, and then extracting their conceptual patterns according to the ‘TD IS SD’ structure, without losing the subtleties in their semantic content. For example in extracting the conceptual metaphor from the following excerpt “good name
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in man and woman (…) is the immediate jewel of their souls” (Othello, 3.3.155-156), the SD and TD categories were preserved as they appeared in the ST: ‘GOOD NAME IS THE JEWEL OF THE SOUL’. In this example, the resulting conceptual metaphor kept the sub- categories of the conceptual units intact while indicating the mother conceptual group of each category between two brackets, whenever needed, as in saying (REPUTATION IS A PRECIOUS OBJECT). The aim behind this is to distance the conceptual metaphors from interpretation because what I classify under ‘REPUTATION’ could be classified by another reader under ‘HONOUR’ for example and the same applies to interpreting the SD ‘JEWEL OF THE SOUL’ as a ‘PRECIOUS OBJECT’. The following excerpt highlights the difficulty
and subjectivity involved in extracting a text’s conceptual metaphoric patterns:
“Expressed by convention in the form A IS B the precise formulation of a mapping is proposed by the researcher on the basis of his or her analysis of the data. It goes without saying that finding the right verbalization for a mapping is not always easy and inevitably involves an element of subjectivity. The way it is verbalized needs to encapsulate its metaphorical force and correspond to what the researcher judges to be the most appropriate level of generality on the basis of its likely range of applicability (…) depending on the mapping’s precise contextual motivation.” (Shuttleworth 2011: 308)
Another example about adopting a bottom-to-top approach in extracting metaphoric patterns is in mapping ontological metaphors where the sub-categorical domain was preserved and the main domain enclosed between two brackets. In the following example, “Yield up O love thy crown and hearted throne to tyrannous hate” (Othello, 3.3.448-449), the concept ‘LOVE’ was conceptualized in an ontological metaphor as a ‘PERSON’. However, for the purpose of accuracy in identifying metaphoric patterns, and taking into account the importance of variation in the conceptual content of metaphors, it is not enough to identify the metaphor as being an ontological metaphor of the type ‘EMOTION IS A PERSON’. More appropriately especially for the purpose of this research it is better for the metaphoric pattern to appear in the clearly delineated conceptual model: ‘LOVE IS A KING WEARING A CROWN (EMOTION IS A PERSON’ and ‘HATRED IS A TYRANT
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(EMOTION IS A PERSON)’. The other value of preserving the exact concept in modelling the extracted conceptual metaphors is to help us identify the shifts in the contrastive part of the analysis. Metaphoric structures such as ‘MAN IS AN OBJECT’ ‘EMOTION IS A PERSON’ or ‘TIME IS AN ORIENTATION’ do not help in tracing the commonalities and
differences between the conceptual patterns of the ST and those of the TT, nor in spotting the main trends that characterize the behaviour of metaphor in translation.
Throughout the process of data collection, I also listed the metaphors by their traditional types (metonymy, personification, simile, etc.) paying attention to other details about the linguistic features and contextual associations of these metaphors. For example, the table of the extracted data contained a column under the title ‘metaphor source/domain’ and another column that listed the traditional types of metaphor. In other words, complicated metaphoric structures were divided into smaller linguistic units that are described both cognitively ‘TD IS SD’, and by their rhetorical components indicating the occurrences of similes, personifications, metonymies, symbols, etc. in producing the metaphor.
Additionally, while extracting the conceptual patterns of the STs, I explicated the metaphoric structures that needed more than a conceptual representation in order to be understood within their contexts. In other words, the process of data collection and classification was conducted with the help of relevant sources which were referenced whenever necessary comprising Shakespeare’s glossary specialized dictionaries encyclopaedia entries on mythology, literature and the Renaissance, as well as the Bible and Biblical imagery as pointed out previously (see Section 4.1 on ‘the Tools of the Empirical Research’).
Annotations on any contextual or other background information were listed in the column of ‘metaphor source’ as necessary to account for the decisions that were taken in extracting the conceptual patterns and clarify the use of metaphor for the text user who might have no
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clue about the actual context of the original metaphors. In this regard, it is worth mentioning that the text user is the modern and contemporary English-Arabic translator who is seeking a close, accurate and sincere representation of Shakespeare’s metaphoric thought in Arabic. The following model presents the sample table that was adopted in the preliminary process of data extraction and classification based on the amended MIP approach1:
Original text Source/ Context Metaphor Type and Components Target Domain Source Domain Conceptual Mapping Immediate context extended or divided into smaller units Bible Mythology Historical or Geographic Reference Lexical Context Domain Creative metaphor (blended or extended) Personification Simile Idiom Metonymy Hyperbole TD SD TD is SD
While the process of data collection and classification under different types and contexts might be complicated, it is of considerable importance to ensure an objective modelling of the conceptual patterns, taking into account the latest research about conceptual metaphor as a contextual case and the functional approaches to the translation of metaphor. The main objective, in this regard, is to distance the metaphoric models from the interpretation of concepts as much as possible, and to identify any mutation in ST data as a result of the translation process. The descriptive part of the empirical study is based on a combined reading of the results quantitatively and qualitatively, making use of the factors of frequency and mutation in ST data.
1 “Our variant of MIP is called MIPVU with VU being the abbreviation of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam the
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