A corpus of metaphors as register markers (2023)

Abstract: The paper presents our work on corpus annotationfor metaphor in German. Metaphors denoteentities that are similar to their literal referent,e.g., when *Licht* ‘light’ is used in the senseof ‘hope’. We are interested in the relation betweenmetaphor and register, hence, the corpusincludes material from different registers. We focussed on metaphors that can serve asregister markers and can also be reliably indentifiedfor annotation. Our results show hugedifferences between registers in metaphor usage,which we interpret in terms of specificproperties of the registers.

## introduction this paper presents ongoing work on annotating a german corpus for metaphor. we are interested in metaphors as register markers, therefore, the corpus includes material from a number of different registers. we annotate all the metaphors in the corpus but nevertheless put emphasis on a subgroup of metaphors which we believe can function as register markers. the paper is structured as follows. after outlining the underlying theoretical concepts of metaphor and register and reviewing previous work, we introduce the corpus. then we present the annotation results, which show huge differences in metaphor usage between the different registers in the corpus. these differences are then correlated with specific properties of registers. ## theoretical background in this section, we introduce the two phenomena of metaphor and register, and the way in which they are related. ## previous work the interdependence between metaphor and register has been investigated for specific registers, e.g., academic discourse @xcite @xcite , fiction @xcite , newspapers @xcite or educational discourse @xcite . functions of metaphors were correlated with sfl features of metaphors @xcite . e.g., the latter claim that metaphor is used in informational registers (like news, fiction, or academic discourse) to express content to a much larger extent than in conversation. berber sardinha (2015) investigates the influence of metaphor-related features on register variation. the group of gerald words from the british national corpus) with the four registers academic discourse, newspaper texts, fiction, and conversations @xcite . @xcite and @xcite annotated a corpus of 13,700 words according to whether the words were used metaphorically or literally. they report different frequencies of metaphors for specific registers, in particular, a very low frequency of metaphor in spoken language. bizzoni and lappin (2018) compiled a corpus of 200 sets of metaphorical sentences and potential paraphrases (rated for their aptness). @xcite created a corpus of 1,500 metaphorical verbs with a direct object. @xcite developed detailed guidelines for the annotation of their corpus (later adapted to german in @xcite . they define the context-based sense of an expression as a metaphor if it differs from another, more 'basic' sense of the expression (e.g., one which is more concrete or related to bodily action). these senses must be similar but not subsumable under a common hypernym, like in the case of the contextual temporal sense of vorbeirasen 'rush by' in (1). senses are defined by suitable dictionaries; if both senses appear in the dictionaries, the metaphor counts as conventionalised, if only the basic sense does, it is regarded as non-conventional. ## results the results of our annotation are summarised in potential metaphor is restricted almost exclusively to sermons. as soon as we omit sermons from consideration in the evaluation of our corpus, potential metaphor does not exhibit a correlation to register anymore (@xmath0.33). consequently, we omit it from further investigations into interdependencies between metaphor types and register properties. non-conventionalised and extended metaphors pattern similarly, occurring mostly in sermons and commentaries. we argue that this is due to the fact that these registers are highly persuasive. this correlation is less visible in the debates, which we put down to the time pressure of oral discourse, a conflicting factor impeding the creation of these types of metaphor. next, we investigated a potential interdependence between metaphoricity and the distinction in oral and literal discourse (summarised in there is a difference between the extended metaphors in debates and in the other registers, however, which has to do with the fact that debates are dialogues that consist of comparatively short turns of different speakers: we found that many extended metaphors are the result of the collaboration of different speakers, in that one speaker introduces a metaphor with a specific kind of similarity and other speakers subsequently pick up this metaphor or use metaphors that exhibit the same kind of similarity. to sum up, our results for the oral register of debates thus suggest that previous very low metaphoricity scores for oral discourse as in @xcite might not be related to orality in general but to the conversational nature of their data, which calls for further investigation of differences within oral registers. as for individual registers, our data first suggest a mixed pattern for fiction, like in @xcite in that it is low on conventionalised metaphors but occupies a middle position w.r.t. nonconventionalised and extended metaphor. at the same time, the register in the corpus that conveys the highest degree of register marking are sermons: they exhibit a high degree of non-conventional metaphors, also, extended and potential metaphor emerge as clear register markers for sermons. ## conclusion we presented current work on a german corpus with different registers, which is annotated for metaphors. future work will use the corpus to investigate the metaphoric potential of specific syntactic constellations (like verb-object and adjectivenoun) and include metonymy as another registersensitive phenomenon @xcite . also, our results suggest that further research on oral registers is called for to delimit the actual interdependence between metaphor and the distinction between oral and literal registers. as a first step in this direction, we will include tedx talks into our corpus, which complement the debates in that they are also oral but at the same time monologic and not persuasive. other registers we plan to look into are sales talks and classroom interactions.