Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (pims): A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to Bridge Theory and Practice

Abstract

Over the past decades, several procedures have been developed to identify metaphors at the lexical level. However, because language is complex, there may not be one superior metaphor identification procedure that applies to all data. Moreover, metaphor identification inevitably involves decisions on linguistic form that may not work equally well with all linguistic frameworks. We introduce a Procedure for Identifying Metaphorical Scenes (pims) reflected and evoked by linguistic expressions in discourse. The procedure is a prerequisite for the identification of metaphorical meaning that extends over phrases or longer stretches of text other than those defined as lexical units in current metaphor identification procedures and better reflects the Cognitive Linguistic (cl) view that linguistic meaning is equal to complex conceptualizations (Langacker, 2002, 2010), embodied (Gibbs, 2006b), and simulation-based (Bergen, 2012). It takes the scenes evoked by the context into account and focuses on the experiences that are coded by the linguistic constructions.