Conference papers, talks and reports
Since the beginning of the project in January 2012, members of the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project team (including project assistants) have given a number of conference papers and talks. The titles, authors and abstracts (where available) of these papers are given below. Please note that authors are normally listed in alphabetical order within papers.
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Anderson, W. 'Warp and weft: following lexical threads in diachronic corpora'. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics in Scotland network event, Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, Edinburgh, 2 December 2016
Using a selection of examples from the semantic field of textiles, this talk will explore the place of metaphorical lexis in corpora of English, Scottish English and Scots, covering the period from 1700 to the present, drawing also on the Historical Thesaurus of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Metaphor Map of English (http://mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk/). It will focus on the ways in which metaphors create meaning by reflecting the social and cultural contexts in which they are used, and will demonstrate how the various resources can be used to establish a picture of the lexical and metaphorical options open to speakers at particular times. It will also address the knotty issue of ‘dead metaphor’ (i.e. metaphorical connections that are no longer cognitively ‘live’ for speakers) and suggests ways in which corpus analysis can help us to determine the status of metaphors.
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Anderson, W. 'Perception metaphor: a bird's-eye view'. Paper presented at Perception Metaphor Workshop, Centre for Language Studies, Radboud University & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, 12-13 October 2016
This paper offers a perspective on perception metaphors based on the evidence of the recorded language history of English. It draws on the analysis carried out by the ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ project at the University of Glasgow. The project data combine the complete evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary (second edition) and A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 1995) to represent the English language over a period of 1300 years. While not a corpus project in the usual sense, contextualised and authentic language is therefore the ultimate source of the project data, and I argue that this approach can provide a useful complement to the more fine-grained analyses that corpus and experimental work offer.
Using a combination of computational and manual analysis, the Mapping Metaphor project exploits the principle that metaphor can be discerned in the shared lexis in different semantic fields. For example, the word forms grope, feel, touch and grasp all appear in the Historical Thesaurus categories of both Touch and Understanding, and instantiate the conceptual metaphor traditionally expressed as understanding is grasping. Further, the direction of semantic change can be broadly established from the date evidence for the relevant senses in the OED and Historical Thesaurus.
Here, I will look at metaphors with either a source or a target in each of the five perception categories. This shows the richness – and long history – of perception metaphors in English, not only associated with the major senses of Sight and Hearing but also with Touch, Taste and Smell. Touch and Smell are shown to be strongly, though not exclusively, source domains, whereas for Sight, Hearing and Taste the picture is more mixed. I will also outline some of the difficulties encountered in the project’s analysis, concentrating on those that may shed some light on much debated issues in the study of metaphor.
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Anderson, W. and Hough, C. 'Metaphor in English'. Schools talk at Glasgow Gaelic School, as part of Explorathon 2016, 30 September 2016
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Hough, C. 'The metaphorical divide between Old and Middle English'. Paper presented at Triennial Conference, International Association of University Professors of English, London, 25-29 July 2016
‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ <http://www.gla.ac.uk/metaphor> is an AHRC-funded project using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English to trace the development of systematic metaphors in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. An interactive online ‘Metaphor Map’ launched in summer 2015 allows users to investigate metaphorical links between different semantic domains, as well as showing which metaphors were current at different periods in history. Some metaphors can be traced back to Old English, whereas others developed later, or subsequently went out of use. This paper discusses some of the main differences between conceptual metaphors in Old and Middle English, and attempts to account for them in terms of such factors as stylistics, word formation, and changing world views.
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Anderson, W., Bramwell, E. and Hamilton, R. 'The boundaries of metaphor: shape, colour and other attributes'. Paper presented at UKCLC, Bangor, 19-22 July 2016
This talk provides a data-driven perspective on the complex nature of different types of metaphor, with a particular focus on links to and from physical attributes such as shape, colour and texture. The discussion arises from the identification of metaphorical links between semantic categories within the Mapping Metaphor project, which has mapped all such links in the English language over time. The Metaphor Map of English, a major output from this project, is available online at: http://mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk/. The data analysed for this project originate from a number of major lexicographical resources – the Historical Thesaurus of English, itself constructed from data from the Oxford English Dictionary and A Thesaurus of Old English – and so provide a relatively complete picture of the recorded history of the English language.
During the data analysis for the Metaphor Map of English, the limits of what can be considered as metaphor were determined for every potential link between pairs of semantic categories. In many cases, the identification of these links as metaphorical or not was quite straightforward. For example, whitewashing has a literal sense of making fabric or buildings lighter and this has been extended to the abstract sense of concealment of the truth in order to give an outward appearance of honesty (in line with the positive connotations and metaphorical qualities of white). However, other connections were less easy to categorise, particularly where the relationship was between physical entities. These instances pose questions in relation to the boundaries between literality, metonymy and metaphor. This also allows us to reflect on whether different physical characteristics which are transferred, such as the shape and colour of a rose, can be treated similarly in relation to where the boundaries of metaphor lie. It is these more complex relationships that form the focus of this paper.
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Hough, C. 'Direction metaphors in English'. Paper presented at Geographic Grounding: Place, Direction and Landscape in the Grammars of the World, Copenhagen, 30-31 May 2016
Geographical direction is a scientific reality, but human perception varies. One strand of the Cognitive Toponymy Research Network (2014-2016) explores ways in which place-names reflect the ‘mental compass’ used by individual speech communities to orientate themselves in space. Building on this, the present paper draws on another project, Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus (2012-2015), which has produced a freely-available, interactive online Map of metaphor throughout the history of the English language.
This presentation will demonstrate the online resource, and offer an analysis of direction metaphors. The Map divides semantic space into 415 categories, organised under the three main Thesaurus sections of the External World, Mental World and Social World. Category 1L07 ‘Direction’ has metaphorical links with 38 other semantic categories in Old English, and over 70 in later English. In some instances, it is the source category, as with 1I13 ‘Hearing and Noise’ (up; metaphor instantiated from Old English). In others, it is the target category, as with 1E08 ‘Reptiles’ (serpentine, snake; metaphor instantiated from 17th century). Some links are bidirectional, as with 1L07 ‘Hell’ (nether, hellward; metaphor instantiated from Old English). As with these examples, more than a third of all links are with other categories in the External World. Also numerous are links with categories in the Mental World, as with 2A05 ‘Psychology’ (extrovert, introverted) and 2E03 ‘Willingness and Desire’ (backward(s), forward). Fewer but still well-represented are links with categories in the Social World, as with 3D01 ‘Command and Control’ (direction, well-guided) and 3F05 ‘Moral Evil’ (obliquely, tortuousness).
Some direction metaphors contribute to well-known conceptual metaphors such as landscape is a body, life is a journey and time is space. Others were previously unrecognised.
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Bramwell, E. 'The Metaphor Map of English: a new online resource'. Talk at the Scottish Place-Name Society Autumn Conference, Linlithgow, 31 October 2015
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Project team. 'Mapping Metaphor'. Stall at Explorathon, European Reseachers' Night, Glasgow Science Festival, 25 September 2015
Come along to our stall at Science Sunday to play with our online Metaphor Map of English and explore the metaphorical links between science and everyday language. The 'Mapping Metaphor' team will be on hand to demonstrate the resource.
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Kay, C. and C. Hough. 'A new perspective on Old English metaphors'. Talk at ISAS 2015, Glasgow, 3-7 August 2015
'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ will offer a new perspective on the English language when completed in March 2015. The main purpose of the project is to trace the development of systematic metaphors in English throughout its recorded history. There is, for example, a strong metaphorical connexion between intense thinking and physical violence in English, recorded from the sixteenth century in expressions such as beat, break, cudgel, hammer or rack one’s brains. Other recurrent metaphors can be traced back to Old English, for example the use of darkness as a metaphor for evil in words such as deorcful, dierne, dimm, mirce in OE, sweart/swart, recorded until 1594, and the still current deorc/dark. Some metaphors are motivated by cultural or scientific developments; others reflect changes in world-view.
Mapping Metaphor uses data from the ‘Historical Thesaurus of English’. The database contains most of the contents of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ (OED) second edition, hierarchically organised into conceptual domains such as Food or Thought. In the first stages, automatic routines enabled links between categories to be identified and quantified through tracking of recurrent word forms. Human coders then eliminated the uninteresting ‘noise’ generated by factors such as polysemy and homonymy, thus isolating expressions deemed genuinely metaphorical. The results are presented visually in an interactive online ‘Metaphor Map’; the OE version will be launched during the talk, giving ISAS participants an early opportunity to assess its potential.
Because the OED omits OE words which did not survive beyond about 1150, materials from A Thesaurus of Old English were added to the database, which already contained OE words that survived into later periods. The OE and comprehensive datasets were then analysed separately, giving a thematically-organised snapshot of metaphor in OE as well as the broader picture. Research conducted so far suggests that overall, although many common metaphors are found in OE, the number of OE metaphorical expressions is comparatively small. The main part of the paper will examine this phenomenon and attempt to account for it. There are many possible reasons: the nature of the surviving evidence, cultural and stylistic factors, or lexical factors such as the preference for compounding as a method of word-formation. A compound such as heofonfyr ‘lightning’ or swanrad ‘sea’, for example, is clearly metaphorical as a totality and possibly in its second element, but will not be picked up by our programs because there is no identifiable link between the figurative compound and a single literal source. We argue that this is not just a programming issue but one which should be considered within metaphor theory.
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Bramwell, E. and C. Kay. 'Giants among men: the real and the unreal in diachronic metaphor analysis'. Talk at ICLC13, Northumbria University, Newcastle, 21 July 2015
Cross-linguistic analysis of metaphor raises interesting questions about representations of world-views in language. This is equally true of synchronic analysis of different languages and varieties, and of diachronic analysis of the development of metaphors over a period of time. The Metaphor Map of English, developed using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English, provides us for the first time with a comprehensive, systematic overview of the lexical basis of metaphor in English from Old English to the present-day. Using its data enables us to investigate linguistic and metaphorical change alongside changes in the beliefs and understanding of speakers during the 1300-year recorded history of the English language, and to suggest ways of representing these changes.
The Metaphor Map as a whole contains 418 separate conceptual categories with thousands of metaphorical links between them. Our focus will be on the category ‘Supernatural’, which contains general terms for the concept alongside more specific sub-categories for areas such as magic and mythical creatures. The Metaphor Map shows that the category as a whole links metaphorically to 119 other conceptual areas in English. There are 32 strong category-level links (e.g. between the Supernatural and Emotion) which, we will argue, show evidence of systematic metaphor, and 87 weaker links which demonstrate a lesser degree of metaphorical connection. The strong links cluster around categories in the physical and mental worlds, with far fewer linking to concepts dealing with social organisation. The paper will look at evidence from some of these systematic links, including target domains such as Morality, Appearance and Disease.
Our choice of the Supernatural as a focus will enable us to examine linguistic evidence for conceptions of the real and the unreal at different periods in history. Understanding of supernatural beings and practices has changed considerably during the period covered by the Metaphor Map. Creatures such as demons, giants and ghosts, now generally consigned to the realm of the imaginary, are considered to be inhabitants of the physical universe in the world-views of previous generations, with consequent effects on human behaviour and conditions such as illness. These are sometimes positive, more often malign. Divergent world-views raise questions about how we interpret apparently metaphorical links, such as pathways from concrete object to abstract concept. Giants, for example, are mythical creatures without material existence, yet the term is later applied to large people and objects and then again to the more abstract concepts of size and importance. Similar pathways can be traced for terms denoting other mythical creatures and locations, such as the link between heaven as the sky, and the physical abode of real gods in the belief system of many centuries, and the metaphorical use of the term for the condition of supreme happiness. Tracing such links allows us to reflect on changing world-views and consequent changes in linguistic expression, and to pinpoint when such changes occurred. In doing so, the paper will investigate whether theoretical positions adopted in approaches such as linguistic relativity, conceptual blending and possible worlds can help to clarify our understanding of metaphor and historical change.
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Anderson, W. and C. Hough. 'Through the mists of time: new perspectives on English metaphor'. Talk at ICLC13, Northumbria University, Newcastle, 21 July 2015
In addition to presenting research into changing metaphorical patterns across the history of English, this paper serves as an introduction to the theme session ‘The lexicon and beyond: new routes from the Historical Thesaurus of English’. The session brings together a number of projects, all of which take a highly data-driven approach to theoretical issues surrounding the study of the lexicon of English, and all of which exploit the unique dataset of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT).
This paper will set out the aims, methodology and theoretical underpinnings of the first of these projects, ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ (2012-2015). The Mapping Metaphor project has established a near-comprehensive picture of the place of metaphor in English over a period of some thirteen centuries, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. Taking as its starting point that metaphor – a form of systematic connection between semantic domains – can be identified through patterns of lexical overlap between the semantic categories contained in a thesaurus like the HT, the project draws on a combination of computational and manual analysis to pinpoint all of the significant metaphors in the recorded vocabulary of English.
We will briefly demonstrate the ‘Metaphor Map’ resource which forms the major public-facing output of the project. The Metaphor Map features a dynamic, web-based interface that enables users to view and explore metaphors at different levels of specificity through a radial convergence visualisation. A top-level view shows metaphorical connections between 37 superordinate level categories (such as The world, Mental capacity, and Communication), while a drill-down view shows those between around 400 basic-level semantic categories (such as Body of water, Foolishness, and Correspondence and telecommunications). Users can also click on individual connections to go to ‘Metaphor cards’ which summarise the metaphor, giving example words which instantiate the connection, and information about direction and dates of metaphorical transfer.
The final part of the paper will take the semantic category of ‘Atmosphere and weather’ to illustrate the functionality of the Metaphor Map and highlight patterns of changing metaphorical connections over time. Weather is a particularly productive source category for metaphor, with connections to over one third of the other semantic categories, including Age (hoar, frosty), Behaviour (frostily), Excitement (gusty, torrential) and Sexual relations (sultry). Less commonly, Weather is a target category, while some connections are bi-directional, as with Food (slobber, bite) and Ill-health (breathless, foggy). A number of the connections can be traced back to the Old English period, through lexical items such as wind, storm and mist. Many other metaphors are much more recent, however, and overall a much weaker presence of metaphor is visible in our Old English data. We argue that this is not primarily attributable to the relative paucity of data, but that it reflects the changing world-views that are also highlighted elsewhere by our results.
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Project team. 'Mapping Metaphor'. Stall at Science Sunday, Glasgow Science Festival, 15 June 2015
Come along to our stall at Science Sunday to play with our online Metaphor Map of English and explore the metaphorical links between science and everyday language. The 'Mapping Metaphor' team will be on hand to demonstrate the resource.
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Anderson, W. 'Metaphors in English'. Public talk at Glasgow's West End Festival, 4 June 2015
Come and find out how metaphor shapes the way we view the world. We will demonstrate the new online 'Metaphor Map of English', which traces metaphor in English over more than a milliennium. The talk will concentrate on 'weather' metaphors: so come rain or shine, join us for some blue skies thinking!
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Bramwell, E. 'Appearance in the history of English: evidence from the Mapping Metaphor project'. Talk at 3rd Cognitive Toponymy symposium, Glasgow, 29 May 2015
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Bramwell, E. 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus'. Project report at SNSBI conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 28 March 2015
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Anderson, W. 'Star-dust and Scotch mist: English Metaphors across Time'. Public lunchtime masterclass talk for the Centre for Open Studies, University of Glasgow, 27 February 2015
The ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ project in English Language, University of Glasgow, is in the final stages of creating a ‘Metaphor Map’ online resource which will show all of the metaphorical connections between domains of meaning that have been made by speakers and writers of English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. This talk will introduce the project and, through a case study of the semantic area of ‘Imagination’, will illustrate the extent of metaphorical language that we use in talking about abstract concepts and changing patterns of metaphor over time.
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Anderson, W. 'Mapping Metaphor: taking steps into education'. Talk at College of Arts Writing and Publishing theme event, 27 October 2014
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Project team. 'Mapping Metaphor'. Stall at Explorathon, European Researchers' Night, Glasgow Science Centre, 26 September 2014
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Alexander, M. 'How can we see half a million words at once? Words and text using the Historical Thesaurus of English'. Talk at the University of Stirling, 24 September 2014
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Alexander, M. and E. Bramwell. 'Visualising metaphor in English'. Paper presented at Digital Humanities Congress, Sheffield, 4-6 September 2014
Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus is a linguistics and digital humanities collaboration which provides a data-driven picture of the extent and development of metaphor across the history of English. It uses a combination of database techniques and expert linguistic analysis to provide full details of the metaphorical links which speakers of English have used to understand the world around them for the past thousand years.
One of the project's main outcomes is a database of tens of thousands of links between conceptual categories, such as imagination and biology (father, conceive, fertile) or beauty and light (shine, radiant, lustre), alongside date information and sample words. While there are a range of other outputs arising from this data, the online resource for exploring the links database - called the Metaphor Map - is a key output of the project. In addition to providing search and browse pathways through the data, there is also a need to provide a high-level visual overview for users. However, while such data is of huge relevance to scholars in a range of fields, including the study of language, literature, culture, and psychology, the size and complexity of the database provides a significant challenge with regard to displaying these connections to users in a way which makes their relevance clear.
This paper therefore discusses the means through which the Metaphor Map has been visualized by the team, including radial arc techniques, network diagrams, and treemap structures. We will demonstrate the importance of such visualizations to guide research on the database, and provide information from our feedback sessions on the understandability of such complex data. In so doing, we also aim to demonstrate the widespread, systematic and far-reaching impact of metaphor on English.
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Hamilton, R., C. Hough and E. Bramwell. 'A new resource for investigating metaphor in names'. Poster presented at ICOS, Glasgow, 25-29 August 2014
Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus is an AHRC-funded research project at Glasgow University (2012–2014; PI Anderson), investigating the nature and extent of metaphor in English through comprehensive analysis of lexical overlap between semantic domains. The analysis is diachronic and data-driven, using the database underlying the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009). The results will be freely available online in an interactive ‘Metaphor Map’. This poster outlines the project, displays visualisations of the interactive resource, and presents two case studies illustrating the potential for onomastic research.
1. The well-known metaphor LANDSCAPE IS A BODY is represented in many languages. Its manifestations in place-names include terms for the internal and external body, human and animal (e.g. brain, nose, tail, veins). Our results suggest that references to clothing (e.g. belt) and textiles (e.g. ribbon) in place-names are further extensions of the metaphor.
2. The project has identified previously unrecognised metaphors, including (in Old English only) links between the domains of light and warfare (e.g. hildetorht ‘battle-bright’, sigebeorht ‘victory-bright’, wigblac ‘battle-shining’). The domain of warfare is strongly represented in Germanic anthroponomy, so we suggest that this may account for terms such as beorht in Anglo-Saxon personal names (e.g. Beorhtric, Hunbeorht).
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Alexander, M. and F. Dallachy. Stall at LonCon3, The 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, London, 14-18 August 2014
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Anderson, W. and E. Bramwell. 'Metaphor, directionality and domains: a data-driven perspective'. Paper presented at UKCLC, Lancaster, 29-31 July 2014
The 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus' project, currently being undertaken at the University of Glasgow, is creating an interactive 'Metaphor Map' for English, which will show the metaphorical connections between semantic domains made by speakers and writers of English from the Old English period to the present day. This data provides an excellent background from which to explore the long-standing questions of semantic domains and the directionality of metaphor, the focus of this paper.
Our source data is the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT, published as Kay et al. 2009), itself based on the data of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and supplemented by A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 2000) for the earlier period. The complex hierarchical semantic structure of the HT has been adapted and simplified for Mapping Metaphor to produce 411 semantically coherent categories (e.g. 'Atmosphere, Weather', 'Ill-health', 'Memory', 'Politics', 'Faith'). The lexical content of each of these categories in turn is then compared automatically with the lexical content of every other category, to produce a database of lexical overlap between categories. Detailed manual analysis is then undertaken for each pair of categories, to identify the overlap which is a result of systematic metaphorical connections, and discard the significantly larger amount of overlap which is due to homonymy and to polysemy resulting from mechanisms other than metaphor. This methodology offers us a new perspective from which to clarify the nature of a semantic domain and a new, more comprehensive, framework within which to investigate examples of apparent bi-directionality of metaphorical connections between domains, such as that between the domains of 'Textiles' and 'Imagination' (cf. fustian and spin, with their sources in 'Textiles' and target in 'Imagination', and illusion which has its source in 'Imagination' and target in 'Textiles').
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Alexander, M. and C. Kay. 'Heaven and Earth: Some Metaphorical Connexions'. Paper presented at ICEHL18, Leuven, 14-18 July 2014
Completion of the Historical Thesaurus of English project (HT) has opened up new possibilities for the study of the English lexicon. It is now available in print as the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (Kay et al. 2009), as a searchable online resource (www.glasgow.ac.uk/historicalthesaurus/), and, for subscribers, as a component of the online Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com/). Users of the latter should note (a) that it is under revision and therefore not an exact match for the other versions, which are based on the second edition of the OED, and (b) that it does not contain Old English words unrecorded after 1150. These are included in the print and Glasgow online versions, using material from A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 2000).
The HT database contains some 793,742 word forms arranged in 225,131 semantic categories, linked vertically by relationships such as hyponymy and meronymy and horizontally by synonymy and, to a lesser extent, antonymy. Automatic routines enable links between categories in this hierarchy to be identified and quantified through tracking of recurrent word forms. In a current project, Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus (www.glasgow.ac.uk/metaphor, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from January 2012 to December 2014), researchers are examining these links with a view to creating a 'metaphor map' showing the development of systematic metaphors throughout the history of English. This paper will describe these procedures and the problems involved in applying them, such as the elimination of homonymy and unmotivated polysemy. It will focus particularly on issues for historical linguists in identifying metaphors, such as semantic change, both within English and in source languages, and shifting world-views. Discussion will centre on a case study of metaphorical links evidenced in categories of Supernatural Phenomena, including Deity, Angel, Devil, Heaven and Hell. It is hypothesized that these categories will link to concepts in the physical, emotional and moral universes, and that decisions about metaphor will need to take account of prevailing world-views, such as belief or otherwise in the 'reality' of the supernatural. In conclusion, the paper will introduce another new project: SAMUELS (Semantic Annotation and Mark Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from January 2014 to March 2015), which is exploring the contribution HT can make to disambiguating polysemous word forms in texts, including those from earlier periods.
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Bramwell, E. 'Mapping metaphors through time with the Historical Thesaurus'. Paper presented at ICHLL7, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 9-11 July 2014
In 2009 the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al. 2009) was published after over forty years of research and preparation at the University of Glasgow. The resource is the first comprehensive historical thesaurus for any language, and was produced using data from the Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Edition and supplementary Old English materials as its basis.
This talk introduces a progeny of the Historical Thesaurus:the AHRC-funded 'Mapping Metaphor' project which investigates the nature and extent of metaphor in the language system of English, from Old English to the present day. The analysis is data-driven and uses the database underlying the Historical Thesaurus, reusing and repurposing the lexicographical material to discover conceptual links through a comprehensive identification and analysis of the lexical overlap between semantic domains. The results will be available online, as a 'Metaphor Map' of the whole of English, showing where and when these links have occurred.
The Mapping Metaphor project will be discussed through a case-study of the domain of Imagination, a highly abstract area which links metaphorically to domains such as Sight, Movement, Textiles, Shape and Air. Visualisations will be used to graphically illustrate these links, alongside a beta-version of the online 'Metaphor Map'.
Bibliography
Kay, C., Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2009). Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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Anderson, W., B. Aitken and R. Hamilton. 'A Digital Metaphor Map for English'. Poster presented at DH2014, Lausanne, 8-12 July 2014
In this poster, we demonstrate a major new digital resource, the 'Metaphor Map' of English, which is opening up empirical research into linguistic and conceptual metaphor on a scale never before possible. We will also discuss our source data, the Historical Thesaurus of English , the new methodology which underpins our research, and our results from the semantic domain of Colour. Finally, we will outline the significance of the resource for Digital Humanities and for research and teaching in metaphor studies.
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Alexander, M. and W. Anderson. '"Civilization arranged in chronological strata": A digital approach to the English semantic space'. Paper presented at DH2014, Lausanne, 8-12 July 2014
This paper focuses on the history of the English lexicon, and on a new approach to this history through the database of the Historical Thesaurus of English (Kay et al. 2009). It does so by reference to the semantic space of English, following Lehrer’s statement that ‘the words of a language can be classified into sets which […] divide up the semantic space or the semantic domain in certain ways’. This space is described in this paper
as the total accumulation of the various individual semantic fields which make up the language, as represented in the Historical Thesaurus' database. The paper therefore analyses the size of the English lexicon in these semantic clusters over time, including its metaphorical links, and aims to give a digital analysis of the history of English in ways which were previously not possible.
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Anderson, W. 'Patterns of Metaphor in English'. Paper at Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM) conference, Cagliari, Sardinia, 20-23 June 2014
This paper will focus on metaphor in the language system of English, and will provide an overview of the metaphorical connections which have been available to speakers and writers of the language since the Old English period. This research is part of the ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ project, currently being undertaken at the University of Glasgow. The project’s source data is the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT, published as Kay et al. 2009), itself based on the data of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, andsupplemented by A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 2000) for the earlier period. The project is creating an interactive ‘Metaphor Map’ for English, which will show the metaphorical connections between semantic domains made by speakers and writers of English from the Old English period to the present day. A beta-version of the Map will be presented.
The complex hierarchical semantic structure of the HT has been adapted and simplified within the context of Mapping Metaphor to produce three hierarchical levels, with 411 semantically coherent categories at the lowest level (e.g. ‘Fear’, ‘Intelligence’, ‘Birds’, ‘Social Event’). The lexical content of each of these categories in turn has then been compared automatically with the lexical content of every other category, to produce a database of lexical overlap between categories. Detailed manual analysis has subsequently been undertaken for each pair of categories, to identify the overlap which is a result of systematic metaphorical connections, and discard the significantly larger amount of overlap which is due to homonymy and to polysemy resulting from mechanisms other than metaphor.
At higher levels, the 411 Mapping Metaphor categories are grouped to map onto the HT’s 26 Level 2 categories (superordinate categories such as ‘Emotion’, ‘Mental capacity’, ‘Life’ and ‘Leisure’), and these further grouped to map onto the HT’s 3 Level 1 categories (‘The External World’, ‘The Mental World’, ‘The Social World’). The resulting shallow hierarchical system enables us to identify patterns of metaphorical transfer between semantic categories at different levels of abstraction. At the highest levels, expected patterns of metaphorical transfer between concrete and abstract types of category are visible, while at lower levels, there is ample empirical evidence of more and less well studied conceptual metaphors, such as emotion is heat and imagination is textiles.
References
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, J. and Kay, C. with Grundy, L. (2000). A Thesaurus of Old English, 2 vols. 2nd edn. Amsterdam: Rodopi
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Project team. 'Mapping Metaphor'. Stall at Science Sunday, Glasgow Science Festival, 15 June 2014
Come along to our stall at Science Sunday to play with our online Metaphor Map of English and explore the metaphorical links between science and everyday language. The Mapping Metaphor team will be on hand to demonstrate the resource. See the blog here: http://blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor/?p=217
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Bramwell, E. 'Making Maps of English Metaphors'. Project overview at Digital Innovations: Transforming the Private Sector, Glasgow Science Festival/College of Arts event, University of Glasgow, 9 June 2014
This talk will discuss the AHRC-funded project ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’, focusing on how we have dealt with the large amount of data involved and how we are making it accessible to a wider audience.
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Hough, C. 'The green belt and beyond: metaphor in the landscape'. Paper given at the Scottish Place-Name Society Spring Conference, Dunbar, 3 May 2014, and report published in Scottish Place-name News 37, 6-8
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Bramwell, E. and R. Hamilton 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus'. Talk at Columbia University, New York, 17 April 2014
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Alexander, M. '"Wear a horn and blow it not": power and authority'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Anderson, W. 'It's electrifying: metaphors of pleasure and excitement'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Bramwell, E. 'The madness of coding'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Dallachy, F. 'A lot to take in'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Hamilton, R. 'Cool, clear and clashing colours: the metaphorical qualities of colour'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Hough, C. 'From Hillhead to Hillfoot: metaphor in the landscape'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Izdebska, D. 'Taking a stab at it: metaphors and military equipment'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Kay, C. 'Food for thought'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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McLachlan, R.'Spatial metaphors in physics'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Paterson, J. 'He doth nothing but talk of his horse'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Ralston, B., H. Valentine and G. Hardwick. 'Biting the dust: metaphors of death in the Historical Thesaurus'. Talk at Mapping Metaphor Colloquium, University of Glasgow, 28 March 2014
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Hough, C. 'Belt and braces: the body metaphor and beyond in place-names'. Paper given at the annual conference of the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland, Gregynog, 4-7 April 2014
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Hough, C. 'The 'mouth' of the River Don: metaphor in names and language'. Public lecture at the Elphinstone Institute, Aberdeen, 25 March 2014
One of the main insights of linguistics in recent years is the extent to which ordinary language is metaphorical. Moreover, such metaphors are systematic, forming regular patterns whereby whole areas of vocabulary are mapped onto each other. Some of these mappings, such as UNDERSTANDING IS SIGHT, may be common to all the world’s languages. Also potentially universal is the well-known LANDSCAPE IS A BODY metaphor in place-names. Found in some of the most ancient strata of Scottish toponymy through to recent coinages such as Foggy Belly and Catlug (Fife), references to body parts have much to tell us about human conceptualisation of the landscape. Drawing on results from two AHRC-funded projects at the University of Glasgow, Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and Scottish Toponymy in Transition: Progressing County Surveys of the Place-Names of Scotland, this lecture will first outline recent advances in the understanding of metaphor, and will then investigate the extent to which body metaphors are systematic in place-names, examining the motivation(s) underlying them, and drawing attention to other, less easily recognised metaphors in the Scottish namescape.
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Anderson, W. 'Mapping Metaphors of English'. Project overview at College of Arts Showcase Event for Production Companies, 13 March 2014, http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/arts/knowledge-exchange/knowledgeexchangeevents/.
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Hamilton, R. 'Crazy about you: Mapping metaphors of love with the Historical Thesaurus'. Talk at School of Critical Studies Work-in-Progress seminar, 19 February 2014
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Aitken, B. 'Visualising metaphorical connection with the Historical Thesaurus'. Project overview at Scotland's Collections and the Digital Humanities event, Edinburgh, 14 February 2014
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Hough, C. and C. Kay. Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus. Project report in the annual reports, Old English Newsletter, available online: http://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/44_3/hough.php.
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Anderson, W. and E. Bramwell. 'Mapping Metaphors of English'. Project overview at College of Arts KE event, University of Glasgow, 17 December 2013, http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/arts/knowledge-exchange/themes/digital/digitaleventdec2013/
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Anderson, W. and E. Bramwell. 'Of anoraks and oysters: metaphors of social communication in the Historical Thesaurus'. Paper at BAAL annual meeting, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 5-7 September 2013
Metaphor pervades all language and social communication. However, despite this fundamental role in language, the study of conceptual metaphor has been seen predominantly as a theoretical pursuit rather than one of interest to applied linguists. The AHRC-funded ‘Mapping Metaphor’ project at the University of Glasgow is carrying out an investigation of the nature and extent of metaphor in the language system of English, from Old English to the present day, through a comprehensive identification and analysis of the lexical overlap between semantic domains. This analysis is data-driven, using the database underlying the Historical Thesaurus (published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Kay et al. 2009). In this paper, and inspired by the conference theme, we concentrate on the semantic area of Social Communication (represented by our categories ‘Society, study of and social communication’ and ‘Social communication, lack of’). We identify the conceptual metaphors which connect these categories to a number of semantically remote categories in the Historical Thesaurus data, including ‘Mutual relation of parts to whole’, ‘Distance’, ‘Wild, uncultivated land’, ‘Darkness, absence of light’, and ‘Secrecy, concealment’. In this way, we investigate which semantic areas language users have drawn on and continue to draw on to express complex and abstract ideas when talking and writing about communication itself. Our discussion will also touch on a number of theoretical issues which are emerging from the Mapping Metaphor project, including the systematic nature of metaphor, the nature of domains, the directionality of metaphor, and the metonymic basis of many metaphors.
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Bramwell, E. 'Vessels, kittens and bits of muslin: Mapping metaphors of people with the Historical Thesaurus'. Paper at Stockholm Metaphor Festival, University of Stockholm, 29-31 August 2013
Metaphor has been a focus of cognitive linguistics for many years now, and is also a key to various other approaches to language, including lexicology, corpus linguistics and text linguistics.
However, due to the nature of the methods and evidence available to linguists, there has been little opportunity to investigate figurative links between the semantic categories of a language in a full and comprehensive way. The recent completion of the Historical Thesaurus (published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Kay et al. 2009) has opened up opportunities for research in this area, and some of them are currently being developed by the ‘Mapping Metaphor’ project at the University of Glasgow (funded by the AHRC). The ‘Mapping Metaphor’ project as a whole aims to investigate the nature and extent of metaphor in the language system of English, from Old English to the present day, through a comprehensive identification and analysis of the lexical overlap between semantic domains in the Historical Thesaurus.
This paper will outline the project’s methods and discuss some of the early findings through a case-study of domains relating to people and humankind. It will use the Historical Thesaurus data to demonstrate systematic metaphorical links between people and other areas of meaning, including the differing ways in which pairs of concepts such as men and women, and young people and old people, are linked with other semantic domains. Visualisations of these data will also be used to illustrate the webs of metaphorical links resulting from the analysis. A broader view will also allow for discussion of some of the theoretical points addressed by the project as a whole.
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Alexander, M. 'Mapping metaphors of power and authority in the Historical Thesaurus of English'. Paper at PALA, Heidelberg, Germany, 31 July - 4 August 2013
Following the 1980 publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, it has been often claimed that human beings, as embodied minds perceiving the mental, social and physical worlds around them, seek to understand the world to a large extent through conceptual metaphor. This paper is part of the AHRC Mapping Metaphor project at the University of Glasgow, which aims to empirically investigate conceptual metaphors of all types across the history of English using the database of the Historical Thesaurus of English. The Thesaurus was published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al), and contains 800,000 meanings from the recorded vocabulary of the language from Old English to the present day, arranged into distinct semantic categories. By examining metaphorical links between concepts, through accounting for all areas of significant lexical overlap between these Thesaurus categories, the project aims to examine metaphor as it is encoded in the language system and evidenced in Thesaurus data.
The paper will describe those links to the abstract Power and Authority sections within the integrated Mapping Metaphor/Historical Thesaurus database. These links include those to do with attention, rapidity, speech, travel, position, greatness, safety, and others, and the paper will present them in their textual and stylistic context as an investigation into the metaphorical expression of power in English across time.
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Project team. 'Mapping Metaphor'. Public talk at Glasgow's West End Festival, 15 June 2013
All the world’s a stage... and all the script’s a metaphor. Shakespeare is well known as a master of metaphor, but did you know that you are too? Come along and explore metaphor in everyday language with the ‘Mapping Metaphor’ project team. The session will illuminate this pervasive feature of language, throw some light on our project, and spark off a discussion of your own favourite metaphors. View the slides.
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Anderson, W. 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus'. Project overview at DH launch, University of Glasgow, 10 June 2013
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Hamilton, R. 'Blue blood and blue collars: the figurative uses of blue in English'. Colour Language and Colour Categorization Conference, Tallinn, Estonia, 4-7 June 2013
Completion of the Historical Thesaurus database, published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al.) in 2009, has opened many possible avenues for research into the history of the English language. This resource, which is based on the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and its supplements, contains vocabulary from Old English to the present day structured with a unique classification system. Rather than ordering words alphabetically as in a dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus presents words ordered by meaning, in a complex hierarchical system of semantic categories. The AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor project (2012-2014, PI Wendy Anderson), of which the present research forms part, utilises this hierarchical system to identify potential metaphorical links through lexical overlap between distant thesaurus categories.
This paper will focus on the colour term blue and selected hyponyms, such as navy, within the Thesaurus data, and empirically examine in which other domains the colour terms appear and how frequently. In addition to the use of dictionary and thesaurus evidence to trace the use and motivation of such terms, the present study will also analyse the figurative uses of blue in current use, through a corpus study using the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Alongside the quantitative overview, individual examples, such as blue blooded and blue collars, will be discussed in detail.
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Anderson, W. and E. Bramwell. 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus'. Talk to the Scottish Society of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, Dundee, 18 May 2013
Metaphor does not merely play an ornamental role in literary and poetic texts, but is a pervasive feature of everyday language too. Over the last thirty years, the academic study of ‘conceptual metaphor’ – when one domain of thought is understood in terms of another – has really taken off, soared, sky-rocketed...
In this talk, we outline a current project at the University of Glasgow, ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’, which aims to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon of language by surveying the nature and workings of metaphor across the history of English. A task of this scale is only possible because of the recent completion of the Historical Thesaurus (published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Kay et al. 2009). The Thesaurus is large (with 797,120 word senses), semantically organised (with 236,400 conceptual categories), and historical (covering the recorded language from Old English to the present day). Using the Historical Thesaurus database, the Mapping Metaphor project identifies and analyses metaphor on the basis of lexical overlap between categories.
We focus here on the concepts of Imagination and Memory, both complex and highly abstract areas in which speakers rely heavily on metaphor. In doing so, we tease out the conceptual metaphors which connect either or both of these concepts with more distant categories in the Historical Thesaurus data, including Biological Processes, Textiles, Inhabited Place, Movement, and Shape. The discussion will also touch on a number of theoretical issues which emerge, including the systematic nature of metaphor, the directionality of metaphor, and the metonymic basis of many metaphors.
Reference
Kay, C., Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2009). Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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Hough, C. 'Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus'. Project report at SNSBI conference, Glasgow, 5-8 April 2013
This paper introduced the project and reported on its potential use as an aid to understanding Anglo-Saxon personal name bestowal.
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Alexander, M. 'Mapping Metaphors and the Historical Thesaurus of English'. Invited talk at BL Labs launch event, British Library, London, 25 March 2013
This paper was one of several at the British Library Labs launch event which looked at how Digital Humanities projects had dealt with large datasets.
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Anderson, W. 'Shining New Light on Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus'. Invited talk given to the Linguistic Circle, University of Edinburgh, 28 February 2013
The recent completion of the Historical Thesaurus (published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Kay et al. 2009) opened up many avenues for research. This paper describes one of these: the 'Mapping Metaphor' project at the University of Glasgow. 'Mapping Metaphor' aims to investigate the nature and extent of metaphor in the language system of English, through a comprehensive identification and analysis of the lexical overlap between semantic domains. In this paper, I take as a case study the semantic areas of Light and Darkness, and tease out the conceptual metaphors which connect either or both of these domains with more remote domains in the Historical Thesaurus data. I will concentrate on a sample of the conceptual metaphors for which there is strongest lexical evidence (e.g. INTELLIGENCE IS LIGHT, BEAUTY IS LIGHT, MORAL EVIL IS DARKNESS), highlight some for which the evidence is weaker, and touch on a number of theoretical issues which emerge, including the systematic nature of metaphor, the directionality of metaphor, and the metonymic basis of many metaphors.
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Anderson, W. and E. Bramwell. 'Fifty Shades of Metaphor: Light and Darkness in the Historical Thesaurus'. Talk given to the English Language Research Seminar, University of Glasgow, 17 January 2013
This paper takes as a case study the semantic areas of Light and Darkness, and teases out the conceptual metaphors which connect either or both of these domains with more remote domains in the Historical Thesaurus data.
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Alexander, M. and E. Bramwell. 'Mapping Metaphors of Wealth and Want: A digital approach'. Digital Humanities Congress (DHC), University of Sheffield, September 2012
The AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project aims to computationally provide data on the extent and development of metaphor across the history of English. It uses the full database of the Historical Thesaurus of English, which extensively categorizes and classifies the recorded vocabulary of the English language from Old English to the present day. By using this database to map semantic categories onto one another, and thus showing lexical overlap in different conceptual fields, we aim to provide results which will demonstrate the widespread, systematic and far-reaching impact of metaphor on English.
Mapping Metaphor is one of the first projects which has originated following the 2009 completion of the Historical Thesaurus database, which contains almost 800,000 meanings arranged into 230,000 semantic categories. As such, this paper will outline the statistical and computational methodologies used by the project, and will present a case study of the semantic categories of wealth and poverty, demonstrating the metaphorical links between these categories and the rest of the language.
Website: www.glasgow.ac.uk/metaphor
Print version of the Historical Thesaurus: Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon. 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
This paper has been reworked as an article and published in the first issue of the journal Studies in the Digital Humanities, available here.
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Alexander, M. and C. Kay. 'The spread of Red in the Historical Thesaurus of English'. Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12), University of Glasgow, July 2012
The basic colour category RED and its exponents occupies an important place in the development of colour vocabulary, whether in the evolution of colour perception (Humphrey 1976), infant language learning (Pitchford 2011), or the history of particular languages (Uusküla 2011). This paper will focus on the development of the RED category in English using data from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED: Kay et al. 2009), which lists synonyms from the earliest English records until the present day. Comparison with other English BCCs shows that RED has by far the largest number of exponents over history and the steepest increase in lexis in the modern period. It shares with WHITE the largest number of subdivisions of meaning in the HTOED taxonomy, enabling concepts such as ‘degrees of redness’ and ‘typical exemplars of redness’ to be explored. Searches on other areas of meaning, such as the nomenclature of the natural world and metaphorical uses of exponents of RED, help to place the category in its cultural and interdisciplinary context and explain its longstanding salience for English speakers.
Biggam, Carole, Carole Hough, Christian Kay and David Simmons (eds). 2011. New Directions in Colour Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Humphrey, Nicolas. 1976. "The Colour Currency of Nature" in Tom Porter and Byron Mikellides (eds) Colour for Architecture, 95-98.
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon (eds). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pitchford, Nicola J., Emma E. Davies and Gaia Scerif. 2011. "Look and learn: Links between colour preference and colour cognition" in Biggam et al., 377-388.
Uusküla, Mari. 2011. "Terms for Red in Central Europe: an Areal Phenomenon in Hungarian and Czech" in Biggam et al., 147-156.
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Alexander, M., W. Anderson, E. Bramwell, F. Edmonds, C. Hough and C. Kay. 'Blackguards, whitewash, yellow belly and blue collars: metaphors of English colours'. Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12), University of Glasgow, July 2012
The Historical Thesaurus of English, published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, contains the recorded vocabulary of the language from Old English to the present day. The full Thesaurus database contains 800,000 meanings and is unique in both its historical coverage and in the detailed semantic information captured by its scheme of classification. Following its completion, the Thesaurus’s potential to enable experimental work in the study of the history of English has been explored by a range of scholars from the UK and abroad. This paper continues that work as part of the AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor project, about to start at the University of Glasgow, which will use Thesaurus data to examine the distribution of metaphors across time in English. By investigating possible metaphorical links between concepts, carried out through an examination of areas of significant lexical overlap between distant Thesaurus categories, the project aims to examine the operation of metaphor in the history of English, using the data encoded in the language system and evidenced in the Thesaurus. This paper will therefore focus on the figurative use of colour words throughout the Thesaurus, empirically examining those metaphorical relationships between colour and a range of other semantic domains which are encoded in the recorded vocabulary of the English language.
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon (eds). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Hamilton, R. 'Exploring the metaphorical use of colour with the Historical Thesaurus'. Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12), University of Glasgow, July 2012
The role of metaphor in language has received considerable attention within linguistics in recent years and one semantic category which lends itself to metaphor is colour. Despite this, few works have analysed the metaphorical use of colour terms, and those which have share similar methodologies by analysing phrases from various dictionaries.
This paper will introduce potential new approaches to the study of metaphor and colour. The recently published Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) (2009) contains a record of the English language from Old English to the present day and groups words by meaning into categories. The AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor project, in progress at the University of Glasgow, utilises the data in the Historical Thesaurus database to explore the evolution of metaphor through the history of English. This project presents the first opportunity to undertake an empirical investigation of the overlap between colour and other domains by utilising the unique system of categorisation of the HTOED. Furthermore, the use of electronic corpora can be used to make a close examination of the linguistic contexts in which the colour metaphors appear.
The question of whether metaphorical productivity of colour terms correlate with Berlin and Kay’s (1969) (B&K) evolutionary hierarchy has been debated by scholars such as Kikuchi and Lichtenberk (1983) and Hill (2008). Further investigation may make it possible to test the hypothesis that metaphorical productivity can be added to the tests for basicness proposed by B&K and revised by other scholars.
Berlin, B. and P. Kay, 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Stanford, California: Center for the study of Language and Information.
Hill, P. M. 2008. The metaphorical use of colour terms in Slavonic languages, in Themes and Variations in Slavic Languages and Cultures, edited by D. N. Wells, Perth: Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association, 62–83.
Kay, C., J. Roberts, M. Samuels and I. Wotherspoon (editors). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Material From A Thesaurus of Old English, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kikuchi, A. and F. Lichtenberk. 1983. Semantic extension in the colour lexicon, Studies in Language 7 (1), 25–64.
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Alexander, M. and W. Anderson. 'Putting the cogs in cognition: Knowledge in the Historical Thesaurus'. Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM), Lancaster, July 2012
The Historical Thesaurus of English, published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Kay et al), contains the recorded vocabulary of the language from Old English to the present day. The full Thesaurus database contains 800,000 meanings and is unique in both its historical coverage and in the detailed semantic information captured by its scheme of classification. Now, following its completion, the Thesaurus’ potential to enable experimental work in the study of the history of English is the subject of the AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor project, recently begun at the University of Glasgow. The project uses the Thesaurus data to examine the distribution of metaphors across time in English. By investigating possible metaphorical links between concepts, through an examination of areas of significant lexical overlap between distant Thesaurus categories, the project aims to examine the operation of metaphor in the history of English, using the data encoded in the language system and evidenced in the Thesaurus.
As a case study, this paper will focus on part of the Knowledge section of the Thesaurus (02.01.12) to demonstrate the Mapping Metaphor methodology. The paper will examine and display metaphorical relationships between knowledge and other domains which are encoded in the recorded vocabulary of English. Links are found with the domains of Food and drink (01.02.08, though items such as raw, ripe, cultivate), Touch (01.03.04, though items such as feel,