Book review

Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis

Jonathan Charteris-Black. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Reviewed by Maria José Hellin Garcia, Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of West Georgia.

Jonathan Charteris-Black's Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis addresses the rhetorical and ideological role of metaphor in discourse. He proposes a discourse model called Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) to analyze metaphors in authentic data. He argues that "Metaphor can only be explained by considering the interdependency of its semantic, pragmatic and cognitive dimensions" (p.2) and thus integrates in his approach the areas of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.

The volume consists of five parts: The first part provides a general theoretical view on metaphor and explains the corpus-based approach to metaphor that is taken. Parts two to four offer extensive empirical research into political, journalistic, and religious texts. The fifth part concludes with a theoretical discussion of CMA.

Part I: Metaphor Background and Theory

The book opens with an overview of metaphor theory as it pertains to cognitive discourse analysis. In Chapter 1, Charteris-Black presents his view of metaphor, which is related to conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1980) but also goes beyond it. Charteris-Black argues that metaphors should not only be analyzed cognitively, but also pragmatically because they are powerful tools of persuasion in discourse. In this regard, metaphors can influence political and social judgments as well as develop new ideologies, thus shaping new ways of communicating.

Chapter 2 outlines some implications of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics in relation to metaphor. Next, Charteris-Black presents his corpus-based methodology of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). CMA consists of three steps: metaphor identification, interpretation, and explanation. This includes the identification of metaphorical elements such as candidate metaphors and metaphor keywords as well as the formulation of conceptual metaphors and keys. The approach also includes both qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The corpus is based on samples of different texts from the Bank of English.

Part II: Metaphor in Political Discourse

The second part of the book (Chapters 3 - 5) examines the role of metaphor in three types of political discourse: Discourse of New Labour, the British political manifestos, and the inaugural addresses of American presidents.

In Chapter 3 it is argued that the New Labour political discourse is strongly characterized by the use of moral terms within religious metaphors, thus framing political issues using the notion of morality. Voting for the Labor party is framed as a matter of ethics, since it is portrayed as the "right" decision. Charteris-Black argues that the conceptual metaphor POLITICS IS RELIGION underlies much of the Labour ideology.

Chapter 4 examines the metaphors in political manifestos of two major parties: labour and conservative. The analysis concentrates on five productive source domains: conflict, buildings, plant, journey, and religion. The data reveal that there are no major differences in the types of conceptual metaphors used by both parties. However, there are differences in how they are employed linguistically in order to construct an argument. The analysis further reveals diachronic shifts in metaphor use. For example, the use of conflict metaphors is more common than building metaphors.

Chapter 5 focuses on metaphors in American presidential speeches from George Washington to Bill Clinton. The main source domains found are conflict, journey, building, light and fire metaphors, physical environment, religious, and body parts. Charteris-Black draws a comparison between the British and the American data, finding that some domains such as conflict, journey, and building are relevant to both, conflict being the most common one, whereas other source domains vary in importance.

Part III: Metaphor in Press Reporting

The third part of the book analyzes two types of press reporting: sports reports in Chapter 6, and financial reports in Chapter 7. Conflict metaphors are frequently used in sports reports because they convey social competitiveness. As a matter of fact, it is shown that conflict is the most common source domain in English sports reports. Charteris-Black also addresses the reverse situation, the discourse role of sports metaphors in war reporting. Financial reports employ animate metaphors to predict events with certainty, whereas they use inanimate metaphors to comment on less predictable events.

Part IV: Metaphor in Religious Discourse

The fourth part of the book discusses the use of metaphor in three types of religious discourse: the Bible, the Old Testament, and the Koran.

Chapter 8 discusses the metaphors in the Old and the New Testament. These are not always clear to identify in religious discourse - the same sentence may be interpreted literally or metaphorically according to the beliefs of an individual. Extensive evidence of biblical metaphors is provided for both the Old and the New Testament, although more are attested in the Old Testament. Charteris-Black identifies a wide variety of source domains, the most productive of which are animals, light, plants, food, and drink. His analysis shows that the persuasive aspect of metaphor is crucial to communicating the Christian message in biblical texts, as well to evaluating human behavior.

Chapter 9 provides an analysis of the Old Testament, focusing on the five source domains building, journey, conflict, weather, and fire. There are linguistic and conceptual differences between the Old and the New Testament. More negative values (revenge, anger, destruction) are found in the Old Testament, whereas more positive ones (faith, understanding, forgiveness) are emphasized in the New Testament. Overall this chapter shows that metaphor is a powerful instrument to communicate Christian beliefs.

Chapter 10 explores metaphors in the Koran, and subsequently compares them to the ones found in the Bible. Source domains such as journey, weather, fire and light, and plants are the most productive in the Koran. However, food and drink, animal, buildings, and conflict are not very productive. Charteris-Black finds less metaphorical language in the translated version of the Koran than in the Bible. However, some metaphorical expressions are used only in the Koran, thus reflecting differences between the religious doctrines.

Part V: A Discourse Theory of Metaphor

The book concludes with some remarks on CMA. It is argued that CMA supplements the cognitive semantic aspect of metaphor, which addresses how individuals interpret metaphors. However, since metaphor is also of a pragmatic social nature, there is a need to account for why individuals make specific metaphor choices in particular discourse contexts. Charteris-Black states that "A complete theory of metaphor must also incorporate a pragmatic perspective that interprets metaphor choice with reference to the purposes of use within specific discourse contexts" (p.247). Individuals are often not conscious of their interpretation of metaphors. Here is where CMA becomes relevant, since it helps to raise awareness of metaphor use to better understand its subliminal meaning in relation to a social reality.

Evaluation

Charteris-Black's book is an excellent contribution for several reasons: CMA advances metaphor studies, since it serves as a research tool for the cognitive and pragmatic analysis of metaphors in real contextualized discourse. The most interesting part of this book resides in the extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence provided through the analysis of different types of texts (political, religious, and press). This includes the analysis of rhetorical and ideological discourse strategies in metaphor use as well as the formulation of new conceptual metaphors and conceptual keys. Along with this, the book also speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of metaphor research. The corpus that is used is available to the public, and Charteris-Black provides the websites for it. The interested reader thus has a chance to follow up the analyses in more detail. I consider CMA a valuable and useful tool for the metaphor scholar. However, in my view, it has more potential that needs to be further developed. In this respect, more attention should be given to the decision criteria of how the identification, interpretation, and explanation procedure is applied. This includes what counts or does not count as a metaphor candidate as well as how to identify, categorize, and formulate metaphor keywords, conceptual metaphors and conceptual keys among others. Researchers interested in metaphor and corpus linguistics research should therefore find an inspiring point of departure for further studies in Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis.

References

Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. 1993. The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp 202-51

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