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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. 39–62

A typological framework of attention-drawing strategies for Ancient Egyptian metaphorical language

This contribution proposes a typology of attention-drawing strategies for Ancient Egyptian that is based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of texts from three genres: wisdom literature, letters and narrative. The focus is on the criteria for attention-drawing that may operate in a language like Egyptian, as compared, for example, to English. After outlining the means by which the Egyptian text corpus can be annotated, it is argued that metaphors can be marked at the graphemic level (where categorisation plays a role), the phonemic level (where word play can be important), the lexical-semantic level (which considers co-textual features), the syntactic level (where metaphors are signalled), the text-structure level (in which metaphor patterns are significant) and the pragmatic level (where the reader/hearer is involved). Many metaphors in the examples exemplify a number of these markings simultaneously, further emphasising their attention-drawing potential.

Keywords: metaphor, attention-drawing, Ancient Egyptian, typology, semantics, conceptual metaphor, text structure, pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.The point of departure
  • 2.Criteria
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Corpus annotation
  • 4.A multidimensional typology
    • 4.1Graphemic strategies
    • 4.2Phonemic strategies
    • 4.3Semantic strategies
    • 4.4Syntactic strategies
    • 4.5Text structure strategies
    • 4.6Pragmatic strategies
  • 5.The role of genre
  • 6.Other quantitative approaches
  • 7.Looking outwards
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.5.03dib
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