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Metaphor Analysis in Social Science: The problem

This talk outlines the process and issues involved in metaphor analysis in social science research. It discusses the identification and grouping of metaphors, as well as visualizing their patterns. The aim is to understand the cognitive frames and emotional content associated with different metaphors used in discussing security and terrorism issues.

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Metaphor Analysis in Social Science: The problem

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  1. Metaphor Analysis in Social Science: The problem Lynne Cameron and Rob Maslen

  2. Outline of talk • Introduction • The PCTR Project • Identifying metaphor: process and issues • Grouping metaphors into systematic sets: process and issues • Visualising metaphors

  3. Metaphor analysis involves investigating the linguistic metaphors used by people to conceptualise and interpret situations. Metaphors offer speakers ‘discourse spaces’ in which to explore experiences, ideas and feelings, and ‘cognitive frames’ to describe and label themes and topics. They provide a basis for understanding and for determining action, and structure emotions and feelings…

  4. In metaphor analysis, the emotional and ideational content of systematic sets of metaphors are identified, together with variation across different situations and social groups.

  5. Identifying the different metaphors used in focus group talk about security and terrorism issues, and their affective value, will reveal cognitive frames and the attitudes and values associated with them, and how these vary across groups. (PCTR project proposal)

  6. in other words They talked about X in terms of Y therefore They think about X in terms of Y’

  7. The Leeds UniversityPerception and Communication of Terrorist RiskProject ESRC New Security Challenges Programme

  8. Multi-disciplinary project • Institute of Psychological Sciences • Schools of Business, Education and Law

  9. Aims • To investigate the effects of background terrorist threat from different psychological and linguistic perspectives • To investigate how the public would like to be informed about particular risks associated with terrorism, and the consequences of particular communication strategies

  10. Research Questions • How do people conceptualise and assess the background threat of terrorism? • Is there variation across groups differentiated according to social class, gender and religion?

  11. Data • Focus Groups with members of the public • Interviews with experts: • Media • Threat managers (police, emergency management, intelligence)

  12. Methods of Analysis • Metaphor • Causal Attributions • Thematic qualitative analysis • Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) (Pigeon et al, 2003) *THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR PROJECT*

  13. 3 Identifying Metaphor: process and issues • The central identifying feature of a linguistic metaphor is the use of a lexical item that can be seen as incongruous with the topic of the on-going talk – the Vehicle term of a metaphor. • The ‘other meaning’ of the Vehicle can be used to make sense of its use in the discourse context. The Vehicle term can be a single word raising or a phrase bring …together.

  14. Choices made already • metaphor as a family-resemblance category rather than a classical category with necessary and sufficient conditions. • Identify through comparison with central exemplars, exclude, place boundaries through explicit decisions (Cameron, 1999) • work with Vehicle terms rather than metaphorically-used words. • work with linguistic metaphors, rather than trying to identify all linguistic manifestations of conceptual metaphors.

  15. Practical decisions in identification • personification • delexicalized verbs and nouns • prepositions • etymology • similes • …

  16. Doing better metaphor identification • Record explicit decisions. • Be consistent across data and researchers e.g. use word search • …

  17. Metaphor Identification sources • Cameron, 2003, Ch 3. • MIP (Metaphor Identification Procedure) – the pragglejaz group • …

  18. Grouping metaphors into systematic sets • list Vehicles • move them around into connected groupings • construct a label for each grouping • sort each group by connected Topics • these are ‘systematic metaphors’ not conceptual metaphors

  19. Constructing systematic metaphors • spark a conversation • heated debates • hype that is generated • power of the media HEAT ELECTRICITY GENERATING HEAT / ELECTRICITY

  20. Emerging groupings from the data • ftp://ftp.home.leeds.ac.uk/workdisk/papers06/Vehicle%20groups.rtf

  21. Not UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING you saw this as a journey did you see it as the big political picture? lose sight of the other’s humanity get a glimpse a distorted picture until we do see each other in our true light.. we’re always going to be dealing with some reduction or caricature RECONCILIATION IS CHANGING A DISTORTED IMAGE OF THE OTHER

  22. in other words They talked about T in terms of V1,V2, V3,V4…in discourse context D therefore They think about T in terms of V1,V2, V3,V4…

  23. Principles in constructing systematic metaphors • keep groupings flexible as data is explored: • keep alternatives alive • be ready to re-group or sub-divide • try for best fit, using your understanding of the talk • don’t over-interpret or construct • find evidence for interpretations • keep dated lists and notes to track decisions • In choosing a label, keep close to the language and word form

  24. Choices made • to extract metaphors from their local context of use • to be mainly inductive, with conceptual metaphors as “sensitizing concepts” (Charmaz, 2001: 515) • to start from Vehicles rather than Topics • level of groupings and labels - specific rather than general

  25. We could… • group in several ways and/or at different levels of generalisation and abstraction and see what this suggests. • try to find more valid and reliable ways of grouping (pile sort; stats; cluster analysis; personal construct theory) • undertake grouping collaboratively as a project team

  26. Vehicle groupings

  27. 5 Visualising metaphors Cumulative frequency graph

  28. Distribution of metaphors

  29. Metaphor in local discourse context • metaphor-led discourse analysis • metaphor at critical points in talk • how metaphors are negotiated, adapted and shifted • how metaphors are understood

  30. in other words They talked about T in terms of V1,V2, V3,V4…in discourse context D therefore They think about T in terms of V1,V2, V3,V4…

  31. Choices and problems in metaphor analysis • What is being identified in discourse data? • How? • How are individual linguistic metaphors condensed into larger units of analysis? • What do these larger units represent? • How do we move between local and global?

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