Let’s Talk Music: A Corpus-Based Account of Musical Motion

Abstract

This article aims to provide a corpus-based evidence of (a) the ubiquitous presence of metaphors in verbal discourse about classical music and (b) the embodied basis of metaphors for musical motion. We analyzed authentic examples extracted from a 5,000-word corpus of texts taken from peer-reviewed music academic journals. We applied a systematic method to identify metaphor-related words (Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [MIPVU]; Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayer, & Pasma, 2010) and to label conceptual metaphors (Babarczy, Bencze, Fekele, & Simon, 2010) that reduces the analyst’s bias in the identification of metaphors. Our main findings are: (a) the presence of metaphors in academic discourse on music (29%) is significantly higher than in academic discourse in general (19%; Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayer, & Pasma, 2010); (b) most of the identified metaphors to describe musical motion are correlational metaphors (Grady, 1999); and (c) metaphors for musical motion are structured in the same way as the metaphors that make up Lakoff’s (1993) Event Structure Metaphor, thus giving rise to the Musical Event Structure Metaphor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the editor of Metaphor and Symbol, Raymond Gibbs, and to Lorena Pérez, Doris Schönefeld, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also wish to thank Tristan Lodge for taking care of the style of this article.

Notes

¹ Metaphor-related item is a MIPVU technical term which subsumes cases of direct metaphor (for example simile), indirect metaphor (conventional metaphor), metaphor signals, metonymies that can be understood as personifications (e.g., “The essay says that …”), implicit metaphor where a pronoun stands for a metaphorically used lexical item, and unclear cases in which the analysts could not agree (Steen, Dorst, Herrmann, Kaal, Krennmayer, & Pasma, 2010, pp. 25–26).

² The MESM also mirrors the phenomenon of duality present in the ESM. Thus, we can either understand change in music as motion of a musical entity from one location to another or we can understand the change as a future that a musical entity receives (this is the case of the metaphor “ATTRIBUTES ARE POSSESSIONS,” as in “Ervoanik sings with Alitette’s folk song”).

³ The way we understand music is actually based on three different types of space: temporal space (horizontal), pitch space (vertical), and key space (cyclic; cf. Julich, 2013).