Abstract
This article presents an explicit method that can be reliably employed to identify metaphorically used words in discourse. Our aim is to provide metaphor scholars with a tool that may be flexibly applied to many research contexts. We present the “metaphor identification procedure” (MIP), followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to identifying metaphorically used words in 1 text. We then suggest a format for reporting the results of MIP, and present the data from our case study describing the empirical reliability of the procedure, discuss several complications associated with using the procedure in practice, and then briefly compare MIP to other proposals on metaphor identification. The final section of the paper suggests ways that MIP may be employed in disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of metaphor.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The original members of Pragglejaz were Peter Crisp (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Raymond Gibbs (University of California, Santa Cruz), Alice Deignan (University of Leeds), Graham Low (University of York), Gerard Steen (Vrije University of Amsterdam), Lynne Cameron (University of Leeds/The Open University), Elena Semino (Lancaster University), Joe Grady (Cultural Logics), Alan Cienki (Emory University), and Zoltan Kövecses (Eötvös Loránd University). Our work has been supported by grants from the NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (Grants 240–70–012, 2000, and 240–70-027, 2001), the British Academy under the International Networks scheme, and Emory University.