The representativeness of the metaphors of death, disease, and sex in a TV series corpus

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the metaphors for the taboo topics of death, disease, and sex in a corpus constituted of the first two seasons of five American award-winning TV series (Six Feet Under, House, M.D, Grey’s Anatomy, Sex and the City, How I Met your Mother). The main research question is the following: are the metaphors in TV series representative of those that can be found in naturally occurring conversation? The first part of this article exposes the theoretical background for the study of metaphor (Conceptual Metaphor Theory) and the methodology (MIP, Pragglejaz group) used to collect the data. The results that were obtained are briefly presented in the second part: a total of 393 metaphorical occurrences were taken into account (122 death metaphors, 127 sex metaphors, 144 disease metaphors). These metaphors were classified according to their source domains. In a third part, those results were compared to the results of previous studies on metaphor in non-fictional corpora (Semino et al. 2017 for disease metaphors, Crespo Fernandez 2017 for sex metaphors, and Bultinck 1998 for death metaphors). The aim was to determine whether the main source domains used were similar in naturally occurring conversation and in TV series. The study concludes on the differences between the metaphors in these two types of discourse, more specifically regarding the functions of those metaphors.