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Mapping English Metaphor Through Time

Online ISBN:
9780191805820
Print ISBN:
9780198744573
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Mapping English Metaphor Through Time

Wendy Anderson (ed.),
Wendy Anderson
(ed.)

Senior Lecturer in English Language

Senior Lecturer in English Language, University of Glasgow
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Ellen Bramwell (ed.),
Ellen Bramwell
(ed.)

Research Associate

Research Associate, University of Glasgow
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Carole Hough (ed.)
Carole Hough
(ed.)

Professor of Onomastics

Professor of Onomastics, University of Glasgow
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Published online:
22 September 2016
Published in print:
25 August 2016
Online ISBN:
9780191805820
Print ISBN:
9780198744573
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Metaphor is pervasive in language, and recent interest has focused on the systematic connections between different concepts, such as heat and anger (fuming, inflamed), sight and understanding (clear, see), or bodies and landscape (hill-foot, river-mouth). Lack of a comprehensive data source has made it difficult to obtain an overview of this phenomenon in any language, but this situation was transformed for English by the completion in 2009 of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT). The only historical thesaurus ever produced for any language, the HT is organized in semantic categories, each containing lists of words used to express a given concept at particular points of time. It is thus possible to compare historical links between categories from a new perspective, gaining fresh insights into how the language has developed. The chapters in this volume derive from the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project at the University of Glasgow, which has undertaken an empirical investigation of the foundations and nature of metaphor using this unique evidence base. Each chapter offers a case study focusing on metaphor in a different semantic domain of English, including Address, Animals, Authority, Colour, Death, Excitement, Fear, Food, Head, Landscape, Mental Illness, Plants, Reading, Theft, and Weapons. The chapters are grouped into three sections, corresponding to the three main divisions of the HT itself—the External World, the Mental World, and the Social World—and each section is preceded by an introduction setting the chapters within a broader theoretical context.

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