Publications

Publication details [#3855]

Danesi, Marcel. 2004. Metaphor and conceptual productivity: Results of a pilot project. Semiótica 148 (1-4) : 399–411. 13 pp.

Abstract

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory is applied to develop a metric for the assessment of conceptual productivity, i.e., the relative extent to which a particular concept surfaces in the discourses and rituals of a particular culture. A pilot project is described in which a corpus of nearly 100 Italian and English written and oral texts were culled for conceptual metaphors related to the abstract concepts "ideas" and "love". Source domains rendering each idea in each of the languages were identified, and the number of source domains for each idea was taken as its productivity index. To compare the productivity of concepts within a language and across languages, relative productivity indexes are calculated as simple quotients; results reveal that source domains for love in Italian are 2.75 times more numerous than those for love in English and that, within English, ideas has 2.47 times as many source domains as love. (J. Hitchcock in LLBA, Accession Number 200500366, (c) CSA [2004]. All rights reserved)