Publications

Publication details [#1036]

Cloiseau, Gilles. 2008. Searching for Live Metaphor Uses in Spoken Corpora: A Prosodic Approach. University of Birmingham. URL
Publication type
Book – conference proceedings
Publication language
English
Keywords

Abstract

This paper explores new ways of analyzing metaphor in a bilingual corpus of English and French scripted interviews. It focuses on the use of prosody as a device to identify and analyze metaphorical uses and to measure metaphoricity. The corpus was labeled both morphosyntactically and with latent semantic analysis tags. Prosodic contours proved to be the sole safe indicator of live metaphors, i.e. metaphors intended to be so by the speakers. The resulting pattern is not live-metaphor specific. However, when used along with semantic distance, it is a fairly good live metaphor indicator for both languages.