Metaphors, motifs and similes across discourse types: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) at work

In earlier studies, I developed a corpus-based methodology for investigating the behavior of systematic metaphors in written business discourse and in spoken news and political discourses. I contended that by uncovering the network of systematic metaphors used in a particular discourse, it was possible for an analyst to hypothesize how actors in an institutional setting (purport to) see their world and their own behavior in it. In the first part of this paper I intend to report on further developments in this area inspired by this approach. Issues of particular interest are: the choice/design/tailoring of corpora, including background or ‘comparison’ corpora, the use of clusters, how metaphors are used in argumentative texts and, how, in such discourse types, they are invariably used with the overarching function of expressing evaluation. The second part uses corpus study in the hope of throwing light on some of the historical controversies surrounding metaphor and simile, including how they relate to each other, their truth-value and how they differ from non-metaphorical similarity-identity statements. Here too all the evidence shows how metaphor is used, not simply to describe the world, but to make claims about it, to construe it in ways convenient to the speaker/writer. The strategic and evaluative use of metaphor and what this can tell us about the users and the discourse context are questions of evident interest to discourse analysts. The use of corpora for describing features of discourse, particularly of interaction, that is, the rhetorical aspects of texts is in its infancy. The studies described in this paper are, then, meant as contributions to the nascent interdisciplinary field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS).