Fly, fly little Comet! Exploring Subtoken-Level Metaphorical Patterns in F innish and H ungarian Texts. New Results from the F i H u C omet Corpus. (2023)

Abstract: The FiHuComet Corpus was created to address the gap in the lack of a systematic comparison of metaphor research in Finnish and Hungarian (Bajzát and Simon, 2023). This study aims to: (i) expand the existing quasi-parallel corpus; (ii) explore subtoken-level metaphorical patterns comparatively in the examined languages with rich morphology. The analysis employs a MIPVU-inspired protocol for metaphor identification, the MetaID protocol (Simon et al., 2023). Although this endeavor is not new, the comparative study conducted on a small-scale corpus has only revealed a few aspects of the potential of comparative metaphor analysis in the context of Finno-Ugric languages selected.

## introduction a noticeable trend in recent years is the research on metaphorical structures, particularly from the perspective of cognitive semantics @xcite . this trend is evidenced by the significant efforts made over the past two decades to map metaphors as a linguistically accessible phenomenon with a comprehensive, language-specific focus (e.g., huumo 2019; máthé 2022). for instance, the development of language-specific adaptations of the mipvu protocol @xcite , the most accurate and widely-used method for metaphor identification, has yielded numerous results examining the typological features of metaphorical elaborations @xcite @xcite . however, the uralic languages were not included in these efforts. this gap was identified by bajzát and @xcite when they introduced the theoretical and methodological framework of the fihucomet project: the finnish and hungarian comparative metaphor research corpus based on quasi-parallel news texts. their paper elaborates on the applicability of the adapted hungarian, morpheme-based version of the mipvu protocol @xcite to the finnish language. this morpheme-based process of mipvu is equipped to address the metaphorical potentials that come from the typological features of agglutinative languages. at the time of the fihucomet project's inception, the corpus consisted of 5,116 tokens, allowing for only a small-scale analysis. nonetheless, their results suggest relatively similar metaphorical linguistic elaborations in hungarian and finnish languages but reveal slight differences, such as variations in the frequencies of metaphorical expressions, metaphorical subtokenlevel constructions, and the complexity of argument structures @xcite . the method and preliminary results discussed above have inspired us to outline further research questions, which are the focal point of this study. firstly, this paper introduces the expansion of the fihucomet research corpus. the given study posits that the hungarian and finnish corpora exhibit similar metaphorical patterns at the subtoken level, considering their types and proportions. ## the results figure 1 illustrates the proportion of tokens annotated with metaphorical expression labels across the entire corpus, with each column representing a news text. the most significant difference between finnish and hungarian news is noticeable in the 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th pair of text. generally, the extent of metaphorical marking in each subcorpus was similar in both hungarian and finnish. however, a noticeable difference in text length was observed in the case of two radically different text pairs (4th and 11th). in the fourth pair of texts, the finnish text was relatively short (finnish: 55 tokens; hungarian: 211), while in the eleventh pair, the hungarian text was significantly shorter than the finnish one (hungarian: 167 tokens, finnish: 867 tokens). this confirms the observation that differences in text length can lead to a significant difference in their metaphorical markedness potential in 'quasi' parallel corpora. for the other subcorpora, the length of the texts was relatively balanced. furthermore, in nine subcorpora, the results indicate that hungarian texts tend to have a slightly higher proportion of metaphorical tags compared to finnish texts. the variance in sample sizes may lead to not only more frequent but also linguistically more complex metaphorical structures in hungarian online news. these observations are in line with the results of the previous study @xcite . however, this can be nuanced by the fact that a higher proportion was also found in finnish texts. additionally, the slight differences can also be caused by the potential stylistic motivation. the higher occurrence and greater elaboration of metaphorical structures suggest that the speaker represented the events in a more sophisticated manner with greater stylistic potential. figure 2 illustrates the frequency of identified metaphorical units within the finnish and hungarian subcorpora. a notable difference is the higher prevalence of metaphorical elaboration at the morpheme level in the finnish subcorpus, as indicated by the mki bar. the varying proportions of mkkomp tags also demonstrate that the finnish subcorpus exhibits more distinctive metaphorical elaborative operations. while the number of metaphorical expressions (mkk) and the examination of arguments do not show significant differences, it is observed that idiomaticity was more prevalent in hungarian texts. this observation can further support the hypothesis of higher stylistic markedness in this subcorpus in terms of metaphorical constructions. figure 3 . illustrates the overall frequencies of labels assigned to the relations among metaphorical expressions in the finnish and hungarian subcorpora. the data reaffirm that the finnish subcorpus has a higher proportion of metaphorical elaborative operations. a higher proportion of possessive metaphorical relations are also more characteristic of the finnish material. in figure 4 , we can observe slight differences in the distribution of semantic relations within metaphorical expressions, which highlight language-specific tendencies and patterns of morphological elaborative operations in metaphorization. in the finnish subcorpus, a higher proportion of postpositions was measured (f: 27.11%; h: 23.62%) but the number of metaphorical adjective structures is lower in the finnish texts (f: 11.12%; h: 15.62%). the inflections initiated the metaphorization are frequent in both languages. ## summary and future perspectives the study aimed to report the latest findings from an ongoing project. although the current fihucomet corpus is still relatively small, it has more than doubled in annotated text volume compared to the previous phase. recent results, particularly the analysis of subtoken-level metaphorization operations, confirm that while there are similarities in elaboration patterns between the two corpora, language-specific differences seem to be important as well. looking ahead, it is justified to expand the corpus further and include texts of various types from multiple sources in parallel corpus building. additionally, extending the metaphor identification map to include other finno-ugric languages is advisable for more comprehensive insights into comparative metaphor identification in these languages. 0.00% 10.00% 20.00% 30.00% 40.00% 50.00% 60.00% 70.00% finnish corpus hungarian corpus figure 2: the proportions of mtags 0.00% 5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% 25.00% 30.00% 35.00% finnish corpus hungarian corpus figure 3: the proportions of mrel labels 0.00% 5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% 25.00% 30.00% 35.00% 40.00% 45.00% 50.00% ela lm tr expm poss r finnish corpus hungarian corpus