This study delves into the conceptual metaphors of depression used in the SANE UK community by both psychiatric professionals and patients who suffer from depressive disorder. By constructing a corpus of news, comments, and blogs in SANE and following the MIPVU procedure, this study discovers significant differences between the two groups regarding the use of depression metaphors. The results show that professionals apply depression metaphors with more rationality, whereas patients commonly use them to express deep emotions related to the disorder. In addition, the study reveals that metaphors conveying either positive or negative themes may contribute to the establishment of a constructive and supportive community. The major implication of this study lies in that mutual online interaction should be encouraged between professionals and patients.
We analyze the use of similes in the QuakeBox corpus, a unique longitudinal corpus of retold earthquake stories recorded seven years apart following the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake to investigate how the narration of extreme experiences changes over time. We distinguish between "distanced" similes that evoke a mediated or emotional experience and "direct" similes that describe a concrete or embodied experience. Linking these simile types to specific topics within the earthquake narratives, we analyze the source and targets used and examine whether this usage changes in retellings. We found the total number of similes used remained relatively consistent over time, as did the proportions of direct and distanced similes. Some source domains were prominent, notably war and movie/tv, but speakers often varied according to which specific simile they used, suggesting that it is particular functional characteristics of similes that persist over time rather than mappings. Building on prior work about similative scales of experience, we find that the direct and distanced simile types represent two distinct rhetorical strategies used to communicate the strangeness and intensity of a disaster and we highlight their distinctive characteristics.
This paper studies the relation between metaphor use and its linguistic and extralinguistic contexts. We propose a novel computational method, using token-level distributional semantic models and cluster analysis, to identify different metaphorical "senses" of a lexical item (e.g. cascade as 'a sequence of events, each causing the next' versus 'a diagonally flowing array of matter') and validate it qualitatively on a large corpus of American English fiction and newspaper texts (approximately 100 million words each). Next, we use the identified sense clusters to study how metaphor use varies as a function of extralinguistic context, in this case: genre. In a regression analysis, we model the genre bias of the sense clusters on the basis of three factors motivated by accounts of the interaction between metaphor and genre, namely sense concreteness, fixedness, and valence. Studying the metaphorical senses of 45 lexical items from the source domains of landscape and weather, we find that newspaper-biased senses involve more abstract target domains than fiction-biased ones. These results show that understanding the relation between linguistic contexts and metaphorical senses can support insight in usage variation across extralinguistic contexts, and, more broadly, that computational methods allow for novel ways to study the context-dependent nature of metaphor use.
