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1093/applin/aml046
Critical Discourse Analysis and the Corpus-informed Interpretation of Metaphor at the Register Level
KIERAN OHALLORAN
The Open University One aspect of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) involves examining how metaphors in texts, particularly hard news texts (reports of very recent conicts, crimes, etc.), imply certain values. The usual theoretical basis for such analysis is Lakoff and Johnson (1980). My article shows problems with transplanting Lakoff and Johnsons discourse-level approach to a CDA register-level one. I use Lees (1992) analysis and interpretation of what he identies as metaphors in a hard news text as a case study to show the following: problems with how CDA prototypically draws on Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to critically analyse metaphor at the level of register. I draw on evidence from a large corpus in order to show collocational and phraseological evidence around what Lee identies as metaphors. I show how this evidence questions not only his interpretation of these expressions, but also his Lakoff and Johnson (1980) inspired analysis. In doing so, I offer the concept of register prosody as well as a corpus-based method for checking over-interpretation of linguistic data as metaphorical, in relation to regular readers of a range of registers.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Linguistic analysis which seeks to systematically detect and articulate how values and ideologies are represented in text is one part of Critical Discourse Analysis. (See for example: Fowler et al. (1979), Lee (1992), Hodge and Kress (1993), Caldas-Coulthard and Coulthard (1996), Chilton and Scha ffner (1997), Fairclough and Wodak (1997), Fairclough (2001).) In CDA, hard news stories are a staple for analysis, given their salience in contemporary culture. My article is embedded within the tradition of CDA and will also analyse hard news material. The following from Bell (1991: 14) provides a denition of hard news. I follow this denition in this article: reports of accidents, conicts, crimes, announcements, discoveries and other events which have occurred or come to light since the previous issue of [the] paper . . .. The opposite to hard news is soft news, which is not time-bound to immediacy. Features are the most obvious case of soft news . . .. Hard news is also the place where a distinctive news style will be found if anywhere.
One focus of CDA is highlighting how metaphors can be ideologically signicanthow metaphors can help to construct evaluation of the situations being described. For instance, Chilton and Scha ffner (1997: 222) point to the use of the argument is war metaphor in politics, for example the oppositions claims were shot down in ames, a metaphor which constitutes adversarial debate as a quasi-natural state of affairs. In taking this position on metaphorical naturalisation of thinking, CDA has incorporated Lakoff and Johnsons (1980) approach to metaphor, what has become known as conceptual metaphor theory.1 Although Lakoff and Johnson (1980) do not invoke the work of Foucault, its perspective is that of discourse in the Foucauldian senseways of talking and thinking about the world which promote dominant world views, cutting across a variety of situations in a culture. So, for example, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) make much of the argument is war metaphor as a dominant way of talking and thinking. Chilton and Scha ffners (1997) perspective in the quotation above is likewise at the level of discourse since they are referring to a way of talking and thinking in politics generally. CDA has also drawn on Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to examine metaphor at the level of register. By register, I am referring to a concept associated with systemic functional linguistics but which has been drawn on extensively in text linguistics generally. Registers are varieties of language which are typically associated with a particular situational conguration of eld, tenor and mode, (Halliday and Hasan 1985: 389). Registers are thus distinct varieties. On this denition, newspaper journalism would not count as a register since it could consist of hard news, soft news, reviews, recipes, astrology forecasts, sports reports, etc. Being at a higher-level than hard news, newspaper journalism could be seen as a genre; genres being groups of texts which perform a similar function (Wales 2001: 338).2 In the case of newspaper journalism (hard news, soft news, etc.) a central function is the imparting of up-to-date information. So, while newspaper journalism would not count as a register, on Halliday and Hasans denition above hard news would. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) do not take account of register-specic meanings with regard to metaphor since it is concerned with everyday language (see quote in Section 2.1), although it seems to be based on introspective data, invented data or data which seem to have been elicited from informants (Deignan 2005: 27). But as Deignan argues, there is the danger that informants may tend to produce examples that are rare in normal conditions (Deignan 2005: 27).
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analysis is logically consistent since Lakoff and Johnsons (1980) perspective on metaphor is also at the level of discourse. But when Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is applied in CDA at the level of register this is not logically consistent. I will demonstrate this problem via a case study, an analysis by Lee (1992) of metaphor in a hard news text, an examination which is prototypical of the way CDA draws on Lakoff and Johnson (1980) to analyse metaphor at the register level. In turn, given this prototypicality, the results of my examination will have ramications for CDA more generally in indicating that when it transplants Lakoff and Johnsons approach from discourse level to register level, this is potentially problematic.
meanings as to the reasons why they were chosen together. This kind of meaning is called a semantic prosody; it has been recognised in part as connotation, pragmatic meaning and attitudinal meaning. (Sinclair 2003: 178) Sinclair (2004: 305) gives the example of the seemingly neutral phrase, the naked eye. Corpus investigation reveals a common phraseology, visibility preposition the naked eye, which in turn reveals a negative semantic prosody such as in too faint to be seen with the naked eye or it is not really visible to the naked eye. To call into question Lees interpretations of the metaphors he identies, I will use a concept analogous to semantic prosody. This concept, which I have termed register prosody, indicates that some prosodies have probabilistic relationships to register. This is in contrast to the non-register specic notion of semantic prosody.
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Lakoff and Johnson invoke a macro-concept, war, to draw together shoot down, target, etc. Their assumption here is that metaphorical processing is structured by this macro-concept. Indeed, this pattern of inferencing from an instance of a metaphor to a macro-concept is made throughout Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and is endorsed in Lakoff and Johnson (2003) and in work in conceptual metaphor theory elsewhere such as Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and 00 Johnson (1999), Ko vecses (2000), and Gibbs and Wilson (2002).
seating arrangements and hurling of abuse in the House of Commons) one might agree that, at the discourse level, dominant ways of metaphorisation can help to exclude other types of discourse. So, there would seem to be legitimacy for CDA to invoke a Lakoff/Johnson perspective for analysis of metaphor at the level of discourse (e.g. Chilton and Scha ffner 1997). But is it legitimate to do this at the level of register?
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people of Soweto as some kind of natural force, specically here as a volcano which has been simmering with unrest and then erupted. This is echoed in the later report that the marchers had swept through a roadblock, like a river. Note, too, that the emotions of individuals and the actions that they give rise to are transferred onto the place where they live. It is the township that has been simmering and that now erupts, rather than the Sowetans experiencing feelings of anger and deciding to march. The effect of these processes of metaphor . . . is arguably to distance the reader from the subjects of the report. In speaking of the Sowetans as a natural force and as a place, the emotions of the people involved and the decisions which they make to engage in particular actions are eliminated from the process of interpretation. The situation is seen as resulting from some kind of inevitable set of natural laws rather than from human feelings and decisions. As can be seen above, Lee argues that the natural force metaphors distance the reader from an understanding of Sowetans as human beings who are capable of acting as agents. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), at their discourselevel perspective, infer a macro-concept, war, to encompass shot down, right on target, etc. It should be apparent that Lee too infers a macroconcept, volcano, to draw together erupt and simmer. He also infers a broader macro-concept, natural force. Lees analysis is then in line with Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in inferring macro-concepts. His interpretation relates the metaphors to natural forces specically and generally. Lee (1992: 93) goes on to say that the fact that Sowetans are represented as a volcano is, in part, due to banality of journalistic style. Since, as Lee seems to acknowledge, erupted has conventional usage in hard news, how far can one assume that a routine reader of the hard news register would come to this text and understand Sowetans in terms of the macro-concepts, natural force/volcano?
3. METHOD
3.1 Lexicogrammar
Lexicogrammatical patterns can be sensitive to register, as Halliday and Hasan (1985: 389) argue: [S]ince it is a conguration of meanings, a register must also, of course, include the expressions, the lexicogrammatical and phonological features, that typically accompany or REALISE these meanings. And sometimes we nd that a particular register also has indexical features, indices in the form of particular words, particular grammatical signals . . . that have the function of indicating to the participants that this is the register in question. . . . Once upon a time is an indexical feature that
serves to signal the fact that we are now embarking on a traditional tale. Given the above, just a prototypical lexicogrammatical fragment from a register could cue that register for a reader. Investigation of large corpora bears out the fact that there is a greater likelihood of some lexicogrammatical patterns in certain registers than others. So corpus investigation can show clearly the distinctive style of hard news (see earlier quotation from Bell (1991)).6 Using large corpora of news texts can create a sense of what regular readers of news text are conventionally exposed to. As Stubbs (2001: 20) says with regard to this issue of convention: our (unconscious) knowledge of what is probable . . . involves expectations of language patterns. Our knowledge of a language involves not only knowing individual words, but knowing very large numbers of phrases . . . and also knowing what words are likely to co-occur in a cohesive text . . . If it can be shown through corpus investigation that: (i) erupted, simmering, and swept through tend to have conventional meanings in hard news text which are bound up with their prototypical lexicogrammatical patterning in this register, (ii) these meanings are different to the meanings Lee makes in his interpretation, then this will raise doubts about his analysis of metaphor as inspired by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In turn, this would have implications for what linguistic data CDA identies as metaphorical in other registers.
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This would be difcult to achieve since to the best of my knowledge there is no corpus of newspaper texts of comparable size (260 million words) from the early to mid-1970s, let alone a sizeable corpus of Guardian hard news texts up to August 1976. Since my purpose is ultimately to show how CDA metaphor analysis, which imports an approach from the discourse level to a register level, can be problematic, I treat the text non-historically (like Lee).
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t-scores of more than 2 as being signicant derives from the experience of corpus linguists that such words are likely to be the most interesting (Barnbrook 1996: 98). Furthermore, the larger the corpus, the more reliable t-scores will be. The 260 million word corpus that I am using is a very large corpus and so t-scores calculated are fairly reliable.
3.4 Phraseology
Recent advances in corpus investigation have thrown up many insights about the nature of phraseological language (Wray 2002; Butler 2005). Since lexicogrammatical patterning is sensitive to register, taking a phraseological approach enables me to use more syntagmatic information to check how simmering, erupted/erupts and swept through are used routinely in hard news. Inspecting phraseologies of the metaphors that Lee (1992) identies forms the second part of my investigation. I examine, in turn, each of the metaphors Lee identies.
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signicant (Hunston 2001: 16). (In personal communication with Susan Hunston, I was told that the comment about t-scores in double gures is based purely on experienceyou dont often come across gures that high in a large general corpus). So does the collocational evidence suggest that, actually, people could read The black township of Soweto, which had been simmering, . . . in terms of water being heated? If this is the case, Lee might have been amiss in inferring volcano, but it could still be argued that Lees (1992) original interpretation is basically in accord with a water being heated reading. In other words, Soweto would still be viewed as nonhuman and thus readers would still be distanced from the subjects of the report. Indeed, it might also be argued that the large number of collocations which include water bolsters a Lakofan container metaphor view. Lakoff (1987: 383) argues that the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor (e.g. dont get hot under the collar) when applied to uids combines with the metaphor THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE EMOTIONS to yield the central metaphor of the system. He then goes on to offer as evidence a number of examples which includes simmer down!. So it could be said, from a Lakofan perspective, that the township of Soweto is being conceptually metaphorised as a container of angry uid rather than as a collection of human beings. I will return to this point shortly.
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morning to demand a fairer wage. This discontent gone on since fighting last May. The dispute are agitating for action. <p> The union dispute thority to withhold payment? The seating dispute the excesses of the war against drugs A row between the Israeli authorities and the EU most notorious fans in the game and ill-feeling been received. A low-level separatist insurgency but a row between the two Cabinet ministers chairwoman. <p> The row between Hynes and Power moves by Railtrack to dilute their safety role ause of foot-andmouth disease, the resultant row is making her sick and ruining her life. The row separatist movement against Jakarta's rule The broad Franco-Italian squabble hard feelings for Mr Horan. Leadership tension current account deficit. Why does a problem that precedented service highlights the conflict that whites didn't budge. Fueling a controversy that ut the case has also highlighted a problem which
has has has has has has has has has has has has has has has has has has has has
been been been been been been been been been been been been been been been been been been been been
simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering simmering
all week since Eritrea for the since June at the state for more since the teams in the for months since the over since October on. Earlier for more than for years. since the in the for years for years for years, in the
Figure 1: Sample concordance lines for auxiliary been simmering from the 260 million word newspaper corpus
container of angry uid and thus dehumanised in the eyes of the reader. More signicantly, it creates a difculty for generating macro-concept inferences from simmering in the Soweto hard news text, that is transplanting Lakoff and Johnsons (1980) approach from discourse level to register level.
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Rather than anger, simmering in the above examples relates to sensuality and sexual feelings, hardly negative in themselves. In the following example, again from ction, the simple past form, simmered, is used in a positive co-text: Ellel wishes me to announce that she is only days away from having in her custody the Gaddir childno, the Gaddir young woman. Ander simmered delightedly under their incredulous stares. Youre bbing, whispered Berkli. At the very least, youre exaggerating! No, hes not, said Mitty, gravely. Although there are only a few examples from ction, nevertheless the positive associations for the past tense (with or without progressive aspect) clearly contrast with the negative associations of the perfect progressive use, auxiliary been simmering, in hard news and neutral associations in recipes. They thus provide an indication of how the lexicogrammar of simmering can potentially realise meaning in a genre-sensitive way (in ction)9 as well as in a register-sensitive way (in recipes, hard news), for which there is much more empirical evidence in the Bank of English. Thus, given the different context-dependent values for the lemma, simmer, instead of thinking in terms of a semantic prosody, I judge instead that it is better, for hard news reporting, to think of simmer in terms of a register prosody. So, has been simmering has a negative register prosody for hard news.
4.2 Erupted
The black township of Soweto, which has been simmering with unrest since the riots on June 16 and the shooting of 174 Africans, erupted again today.
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The following collocates were found, shown here with their frequency and t-score: violence (214 14.5), row (190 13.7), ghting (87 9.2), fury (82 9.02), scandal (79 8.8), war (78 7.8), crisis (53 7.0), controversy (53 7.2), trouble (50 6.8), volcano (41 6.4), rioting (34 5.8), gunre (32 5.6), battle (30 5.0), riots (28 5.2), dispute (28 5.2), clashes (21 3.8), furore (20 4.4), protests (19 4.27), conict, (18 4.0), feud (14 3.7), protest (13 3.39), revolt (12 3.4), tensions (12 3.4), chaos (10 3.03), killing (8 2.4), struggle (8 2.5). This time, there are more instances of volcano (41). There are also eight instances of Vesuvius and ve of Nyiragongo. But still, the number of instances of volcano and names of volcanoes as collocates actually amounts to only around 4 per cent of the total. The largest t-score, 14.5, is for violence whereas the t-score for volcano is much lower at 6.4. Since the t-score for violence is over 10, it is very signicant. These instances of violence refer to human phenomena. So, overwhelmingly, erupted has a semantic preference for human phenomena. As with simmering, the newspaper corpus evidence initially raises doubt about reading erupted in the Soweto text as connected with volcanic meaning.
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issue since the scandal in America in the West Bank and gun battles called by passers-by after a dispute tourists. <p> Last week's fighting at Kabul airport. Fresh fighting nto the city since renewed fighting one said. On Friday, when firing Officers slam 'cosy deal' <p> FURY <dt> 18 May 2002 </dt> <p> FURY Terminal when the gunfire new system." <p> Other protests have <p> The tension of the occasion Then seven years later the problem <p> Rumbles of controversy recently the two clubs continues. <p> The row their silence. But the scandal of the council that horrible scenes the Marines. When a political storm village of Montrado when violence were sent to Bosnia when civil war
erupted. "Behavior which might give erupted in the Gaza Strip yesterday, a day erupted between the driver of a Mercedes erupted around the old Spanish colonial erupted yesterday in northern Afghanistan erupted between Palestinians and Israelis erupted in this corner of southern Kosovo, erupted last night after a police chief erupted yesterday as an arsonist aged 15 erupted. "It echoed all over the airport," erupted in the ghetto satellite district erupted at odd moments. Speaking too long, erupted again when the couple tried to erupted over the world of famed US jock erupted last week when Andrew accused erupted this year with new allegations of erupted. They held out no olive branch, erupted in April over an American spy erupted after the murder of a Dayak boy. erupted there in 1992. They quickly
Figure 2: Sample concordance lines for erupted in the past tense from the 260 million newspaper corpus
What is interesting about this football report example is that there is no modication of erupted, for example, with a postmodier such as with joy. However, we would understand erupted here in a positive sense since football supporters are celebrating a goal. Other metonymic10 collocates, in the sports report register, such as press box, ground, room, and stadium all relate explicitly to eruptions of applause, joy, etc. in relation to the watching of a sports game. The non-metonym, crowd, is particularly marked in this usage; there are 51 collocates with a signicant t-score of 7.0 in the 260 million word news corpus. Indeed, the fact that erupted in the past tense has largely positive associations in the sports report register, but largely negative ones in the hard news register, provides evidence for seeing erupted in register prosody terms rather than semantic prosody terms. I should stress that the concept of register prosody is a probabilistic one. While the meanings around erupted in the past tense in hard news are overwhelmingly negative, there are a small number of instances of erupted in the past tense in hard news which carry positive meanings (e.g. reworks erupted and champagne corks were popping in a story about the rst day of the new millennium). Biber et al. (1999: passim) comment that the need for economy affects lexicogrammatical choices in news given the need to save space in hard news and maximise what is novel. This is why Biber et al. (1999: 477) argue the short passive is common in news, (e.g. Doherty was arrested in New York in June). Extrapolating to the use of erupted in the Soweto text, one might say that because erupted in the past tense carries a negative register prosody in hard news, its use allows the compressed meaning-making that there has been a dramatic initiation of violence without violence actually having to be mentioned. In the Soweto text, it could thus be argued that erupted
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serves a textual function in systemic functional terms (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Similar things could be said with regard to erupted in the sports report register. Here erupted would seem to have a positive register prosody and so communicate joy without it having to be inscribed in the text. In tune with Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoffs (1987: 377415) case study of the metaphorisation of anger is register non-specic. His examples too relate to everyday language and seem to be based on introspective data, invented data or data elicited from informants. Moreover, most of the sentence examples with metaphors in Lakoff (1987) (and Lakoff and Johnson 1980) have pronouns as subjects just as in She erupted (and like the argument is war examples in 2.1). But in the whole of the Bank of English, the majority of the instances of erupted do not have subject pronouns. (There are only eight instances of Lakoffs example of She erupted). As with the 260 million word newspaper corpus, the overwhelming majority of instances of erupted in the whole of the Bank of English relate not to volcanoes but to negative human phenomena, and human phenomena represented lexically rather than human beings represented through subject pronouns. The phraseological approach as afforded through corpus techniques of investigation shows up the problems with concocting examples, as well as those arising from failing to consider register specicity.
4.3 Erupt(s)
(headline) Police open re as Soweto erupts again I move on to looking at the present tense form, erupts, as this is the form in the headline. Since the results are similar to those for erupted, my coverage here will be briefer than in Section 4.2. Erupts has collocates in common with erupted, with the highest co-occurrence for erupts being violence (38 instances; t-score 6.1). As with erupted, there is a strong semantic preference for human phenomena. In contrast, there are 10 instances of volcano collocating with erupts but the t-score is at borderline signicance at 1.8. There are 1,468 instances of erupt(s) in the present tense. 36 of these instances occur in headlines in hard news. In contrast, erupted occurs in only two headlines and neither of these is from hard news texts (one is from soft news and the other is from a letters page). Volcano makes up 5 per cent of the total lexical collocates of erupt in hard news text bodies and 17 per cent of the total lexical collocates of erupt in headlines. This gure is still only 17 per cent; collocates of erupt(s) in headlines overwhelmingly have a semantic preference for human phenomena such as disputes. The prosody is usually a negative one, as with erupted. In sum, and similar to the evidence for erupted, corpus evidence suggests erupt(s)
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in the Soweto headline is not likely to be associated with volcanoes for regular readers of the hard news register.
4.4 Eruption(s)
To obtain a better sense of phraseological behaviour of the (broadly dened) lemma erupt, let me now go a little further and compare the results for erupt(s) and erupted with those for the noun form, eruption(s), in the 260 million word newspaper corpus. Interestingly, collocates for eruption(s) are overwhelmingly connected with volcanoes or related geological phenomena: Eruption: volcanic (68 8.2), Nyiragongo (18 4.2), violence (16 3.9), volcano (15 3.8), Vesuvius (9 3.0), lava (5 2.2), scientists (5 2.2), tremors (5 2.2), violent (5 2.2). Eruptions: volcanic (59 7.6), earthquakes (9 3.0), ash (5 2.2), violence (5 2.2), volcano (5 2.2), volcanoes (5 2.2). The relatively high frequencies and t-scores for volcanic provide evidence that eruption(s) is much more likely to have meanings associated with volcanoes in news than erupted and erupt(s). (The phrase violent eruption(s) refers in the main to volcanic disturbances.) To further explore the phraseological behaviour of eruption(s), I looked more generally across the 450 million word Bank of English, which also contains academic texts amongst two book subcorpora. With this wider exploration, I found that eruption(s), either in hard news or academic texts, is predominantly used to refer to volcanoes. Here is one example from an academic source: Both these methods act as geochemical stopwatches, which are reset to zero in the rocks that are formed from volcanic eruptions. Potassium has been given the symbol K, from the Arabic kali (alkali). It is one of the commoner elements in the earths crust and indeed in our own bodies. Overall, in contrast to erupt(s) and erupted, there is a much greater tendency for eruption(s) to have meanings associated with volcanoes and in a way which would appear to be not so register-specic. It would seem also that in hard news the semantic extension of eruption(s) is much more restricted than for erupted and erupt(s). This is also reected in only two instances of a positive meaning for eruption, that of applause. In other words, delexicalisation of eruption(s) in collocation is less likely to happen in hard news than with erupt and erupted. This has an interesting corollary: if the writer of the Soweto text had chosen eruption in describing Soweto, then the corpus evidence suggests that volcanic meanings would be more likely to be associated with Soweto
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than if he had used erupted. This would then have chimed with Lees (1992) interpretation.
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a human agent. It must be said, however, that for had swept through, there are only a small number of instances in the Bank of English and so there is a danger of generalising too far beyond this data (which is why I have not generated t-scores). It might, then, be better to have a broader perspective by looking only at swept through, rather than just had swept through, across news corpora in The Bank of English.
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through without a hitch and put on a ruthless performance to win 61, 63, 62. In sum: on the basis of the corpus evidence, the (Sowetan) marchers sweeping through a roadblock could, for regular readers of hard news text, have some particular natural force meaning.11 This is in the sense that the marchers are unstoppable as are some res. Nonetheless, given the evidence mentioned above, it is unlikely that readers will not understand that the marchers are human agents.
5. DISCUSSION
I have shown how, in the hard news register, has been simmering, as well as erupted in the past tense, have a semantic preference for human phenomena, rather than for volcanoes, and carry a negative register prosody. The same is true for erupt(s) although not to the same degree. However, there is evidence that eruption in collocation is much more likely to carry meanings associated with volcanoes inside and outside the hard news register. So, across different forms of the lemma, erupt, there would seem to be a cline of delexicalisation from eruption(s) to erupt(s) to erupted. This extends Louws point (cited in Sinclair 2004: 198) that literal and gurative are points close to the extremities of a continuum of delexicalization since the corpus evidence suggests: (i) a cline of delexicalisation can be related to lexicogrammar; (ii) delexicalisation (e.g. of erupted and erupt(s)) can have a strong afnity with register. Further corpus exploration may identify that context-dependent prosodies can operate at the level of genre as well (i.e. a genre prosody). Looking overall at Lees interpretation of simmering, erupted, and swept through, there is inconsistency in the way he identies the linguistic data as metaphorical. The corpus evidence shows that Lee has a lexicalised interpretation of both simmering and erupted but has a delexicalised reading of swept through (in not relating the data to a broom, etc.). So it is not only Lees analysis and interpretation of individual bits of data that is problematic but also how he makes overall interpretation of the data. Widdowson (2004) uses the term pretextual to describe how certain scholars, particularly some critical discourse analysts, interpret texts in a way which corroborates their values while implicitly assuming that target readers will understand the text in the same way. I have also shown how corpus evidence is useful in avoiding: (i) pretextual metaphorical lexicalisation of textual data (ii) producing a misleading overall interpretation of textual data identied as metaphorical from the perspective of readers who have been routinely exposed to the texts register. I have shown how difculties can arise in transplanting Lakoff and Johnsons (1980) approach to metaphor from discourse level to a register level. This raises the prospect that importing Lakoff and Johnsons discourse level
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analysis into other register-based critical analyses of metaphors is potentially problematic. I offer the method used above as a convenient way for CDA to help reduce the following: over-interpretation of linguistic data as metaphorical, in relation to regular readers of a range of registers. Indeed, the method is straightforward enough to be used by students in seminars (with an appropriate and large corpus resource), either on texts of their own choosing or on texts previously analysed by critical discourse analysts together with their interpretations. Finally, I would argue that critical discourse analysts cannot automatically claim that metaphors are lexicalised without reference to empirical evidence, something which, in invoking Lakoff and Johnsons discourse-based perspective, they often take as a matter of course. To be as conclusive as possible, it must be said that a combination of corpus inspection and reader response exploration is needed. This article also offers a method for developing constrained hypotheses about how readers are likely to interpret what might initially appear to be metaphors. In being constrained, such hypotheses are more likely to be worth empirically testing in reader response studies. Final version received March 2006
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for perceptive and useful comments on this article. Special thanks as well to Sarah North for the same. I am grateful to Guardian News and Media Limited for permission to use the extract from the Guardian.
NOTES
1 In its analysis of metaphor, CDA has mostly referred to this pioneering work in cognitive linguistics rather than any subsequent work on metaphor. When in 2003 Lakoff and Johnson (1980) was reissued, it carried a new (second) afterword which, in part, takes stock of the ideas in the book and the impact the book has had in its over twenty years of circulation. There was, however, no revision of the main body of the text. 2 On the distinction between register and genre, I follow McCarthy and Carter (1994) and Wales (2001), as well as systemic functional linguistic work on genre (see, Martin and Rose 2003: 2545), where genre is treated at a higher level than register. As Wales (2001: 338) comments: It is probably easiest to see registers as particular situational congurations of linguistic resources, quite specically contextually determined; genres are larger or higher-level structures, groups of texts which are recognised as performing broadly similar functions in society. So [the genre of] advertising comprises
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specic types which vary in choices of linguistic features, for example according to medium (TV, radio, magazine, etc.), eld (beauty products, mobile phones), tenor (target audience, etc). Register is thus a usefully exible concept: we can appreciate genres for their shared elements; but no two registers can be identical. Both registers and genres can cue a variety of discourses (in the Foucauldian sense). So the above registers and genres could potentially cue discourses of lifestyle, health, and nutrition. A text from the hard news register, on the other hand, covering the 11 September 2001 atrocities in the USA, could cue very different discourses, e.g. US nationalism, terrorism, religion, war. Moreover, different registers and genres could cue the same discourse. Hard news texts relating to the recipe register (e.g. on eating in schools) or the food preparation instructions genre all could cue discourses of nutrition. Discourses cut across registers and genres. The analysis of metaphor in a hard news text by Fairclough (1989, 2001) is endorsed by Weber (1996: 7). On how UK parliamentary discourse on one day was framed in the press using metaphors of war, violence etc, see: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/ conservatives/story/0,,1662005,00. html (accessed 21 December 05). Lee (1992) does not provide the headline of this extract. Here is one example of a lexicogrammatical pattern in hard news from Biber et al. (1999) which is marked in contrast to evidence from academic prose, ction, and conversation in English. Hard news is for Biber et al. (1999: 844): particularly marked in its use of after, where it often provides background
information about prior events, following presentation of the main story line: In a related case, four Trinity College Dublin student leaders were cleared of contempt after the society sought to have them jailed for alleged breaches of an earlier injunction restricting distribution of literature on abortion services. (NEWS). 7 Such a delocalised collocational approach ties in with connectionist modelling of language processing. The meaning of lexical items in a sentence is not compositional but distributed in connectionist representations of sentences (see McClelland et al. 1986, Rumelhart et al. 1986). 8 T-score depends on a number of calculations. The rst is the number of instances of the co-occuring word in the specied span. This value is known as the Observed. The second calculation is based on the null hypothesis: the co-occurring word has no effect at all on its lexical environment. In other words, its relative frequency of co-occurrence with the node word in the specied span is the same as its relative frequency in the whole of the corpus under investigation. This value is known as the Expected. The nal calculation that t-score depends on is standard deviation. This calculation involves the probability of co-occurrence of the node and the collocate and the number of words in the specied span in all concordance lines. T-score is calculated by rstly subtracting the Expected from the Observed and dividing this number by the standard deviation value. 9 Given that the Bank of English only allows ve lines of co-text to be inspected, it is difcult to say whether
5 6
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the was simmering extracts come from highly specic types of romantic ction which might be categorisable in register terms rather than genre terms. Given also the much smaller amount of ction data available in the Bank of English in contrast with news data, it would be difcult in any case to say denitively whether was simmering has a register prosody in specic romantic ctional texts. But, it may be that was simmering is strongly associated with positive connotations in romantic ction more generally speaking, i.e. it has a genre prosody. With a large corpus of romantic ction textsbroadly denedit would be
possible to investigate the possibility that was simmering instead carries a genre prosody. 10 See Widdowson (2000) for a critique of Lees (1992) perspective on metonymy in the Soweto text. 11 Although I acknowledge the prospect that swept through may carry some associations of a particular natural force, this is not an endorsement of a Lakoff and Johnson (1980) macroinference generation from a metaphor at the register level. This is because a Lakoff and Johnson macro-inference from swept through would be based on a compositional reading and thus a focus on swept.
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