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Drawing Attention to Metaphor: Case studies across time periods, cultures and modalities
Edited by Camilla Di Biase-Dyson and Markus Egg
[Figurative Thought and Language 5] 2020
► pp. 15–38

The role of co-text in the analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor

| Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen
| Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
| Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
| University of Amsterdam

Taking Deliberate Metaphor Theory (Steen, 2015) as a starting point, this chapter investigates the way in which co-text influences the identification and analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor in discourse. While co-text plays a role in the identification and analysis of the linguistic and conceptual dimensions of metaphor, its role in the identification and analysis of metaphor as metaphor at the communicative dimension is more complex. In a series of analyses, we first examine metaphors in relative isolation (at utterance level), and subsequently take additional textual information into consideration. We demonstrate how co-text can play an indispensable role in the identification and further analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor, thereby providing important new insights into the complexity of deliberate-metaphor analysis.

Keywords: deliberate metaphor, Deliberate Metaphor Theory, figurative language, discourse analysis, co-text, qualitative analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
  • 3.The role of co-text in the identification and analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor
    • 3.1The role of co-text in the analysis of similes
    • 3.2Extended metaphor as co-text in the analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor
    • 3.3Recurrent metaphor as co-text in the analysis of potentially deliberate metaphor
  • 4.Conclusion and discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.5.02rei
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