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Description
The identification of metaphors provides a strong foundation for further metaphor research. Since Lakoff and Johnson (1980) introduced the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, most research has focused on metaphor’s conceptual and cognitive aspects, often relegating the linguistic dimension. Much of this research has relied on researchers’ intuition rather than systematic analysis. However, metaphor identification procedure MIP (Pragglejaz Group, 2007) and its elaborated version MIPVU (Steen et al., 2010) introduced a systematic and reliable methodology for identifying linguistic metaphors. Both procedures compare basic and contextual meanings to determine metaphorically used words. Whether contextual and basic meanings are distinct enough is measured by their degree of independence as separate meaning descriptions in the dictionary, which have become integral to metaphor identification. Any meaning not found in these dictionaries is considered novel. A slightly modified version of the MIPVU approach, incorporating similar modifications as outlined in Bogetić, Broćić, and Rasulić (2019), was employed to manually annotate a small corpus in the Slovene language (Antloga, 2020). We referred to the Dictionary of the Standard Slovene Language (SSKJ) when determining the meaning of a lexical unit. During the process, we started to pay more attention not only to sense disambiguation but also to how identified metaphorical expressions are represented in the dictionary and the way dictionary entries reflect identified conceptual structuring. We expanded our analysis through manual inspection of entries, definitions, and observations in other lexicographic resources, such as the Thesaurus of Modern Slovene, The Collocation Dictionary of Modern Slovene, and The Dictionary of Slovenian Transitive Verbs. We only considered indirect metaphorical expressions since direct language use cannot be captured by contrasting basic and contextual meanings and should, therefore, be approached without the use of dictionaries. We employed a bottom-up approach to first identify conceptual mappings from annotated indirectly used metaphor expressions (like absorb the wisdom of others). We later observed the metaphor scenario, namely what kind of information about the conceptual structure (absorb what) of the metaphor (BODY IS A CONTAINER and KNOWLEDGE IS A SUBSTANCE) we can extract from the dictionary entry of the literal and metaphorical meaning(s), for example, from the literal meaning (to absorb ‘to take in by sipping’) omitting the manner in which the absorption is done when defining metaphorical meaning (‘to take in’), indicating a level of abstraction by eliminating the human activity. The Collocation Dictionary of Modern Slovene supports the existence of a metaphor QUALITIES ARE SUBSTANCES (and therefore KNOWLEDGE IS A SUBSTANCE) by listing collocations to absorb knowledge, to absorb beauty, to absorb positive feelings. During the analysis of individual lexical units, we made some observations regarding the treatment of metaphorical expressions in the dictionary (Table 1).
