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Metaphor in Specialist Discourse
Edited by J. Berenike Herrmann and Tony Berber Sardinha
[Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication 4] 2015
► pp. 17–52

Register variation and metaphor use

A multi-dimensional perspective

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One of the consistent findings in the literature from a corpus-based perspective is that the incidence of metaphor varies across different registers. The goal of this chapter is to verify to what extent the variation in metaphor use is systematic in English, from a Multi-Dimensional perspective. The VU University Annotated Metaphor Corpus was used, comprising over 200,000 words in four registers. In total, 250 different features were included in the study. The main results show which dimensions underlie metaphor use in English, how metaphor relates to the dimensions of variation in English, how much variation can be accounted for by knowing register distinctions, and which are the metaphorbased text types in English.
Published online: 16 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/milcc.4.02ber
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