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Article In:
Current challenges in metaphor research
Edited by Nina Julich-Warpakowski and Paula Pérez-Sobrino
[Metaphor and the Social World 13:1] 2023
► pp. 81–103

The semantics of a parallel reality

What does religion do to metaphor in an Ancient Egyptian context?

| Macquarie University

This paper considers the use of figurative language when intangible or supernatural phenomena are described in language. The case studies are derived from texts written in Ancient Egyptian, an extinct Afroasiatic language (ca. 3200 bce–1300 ce). It is argued that a MIPVU-based analysis, otherwise very useful for interrogating all kinds of texts, even those from the ancient world, needs to be modified to account for the layers of meaning encountered in texts in which a deity is being described. A more nuanced approach, which considers the scalarity of metaphor and reconsiders the conceptual modelling of metaphorical language in a culturally sensitive way, is proposed. As such, the methods proposed here may be useful for scholars working on metaphor in texts with religious content.

Keywords: metaphor analysis, Ancient Egyptian language, religion, belief, cognition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Metaphor and belief
    • 1.2Metaphor and culture
    • 1.3About ancient Egyptian
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Corpus-based dictionaries
    • 2.2Access to lemmatised digital datasets
    • 2.3Annotation schema
    • 2.4Cultural context of the material
    • 2.5Suggestions for annotating metaphors in religious encounters
  • 3.Case studies
    • 3.1The vengeful god of Egyptian prayers
    • 3.2The decisive god of Egyptian oracular proceedings
    • 3.3The transcendent god of Egyptian hymns
  • 4.Conclusion and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
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