A corpus-based study of ‘mixed metaphor’ as a metalinguistic comment

Semino, Elena (2016) A corpus-based study of ‘mixed metaphor’ as a metalinguistic comment. In: Mixing metaphor :. Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication . John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 203-220. ISBN 9789027202109

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

This chapter investigates the use of the expression ‘mixed metaphor’ as a metalinguistic comment in the two-billion-word Oxford English Corpus. I consider the co-text of 141 occurrences of ‘mixed metaphor’ in the corpus, in order to shed light on the kinds of uses of metaphors that writers opt to explicitly draw attention to as involving ‘mixing’. I show how folk understandings of ‘mixed metaphor’ include phenomena that do not correspond to the technical use of the term in the specialist literature, and reflect on the implications of these findings for metaphor theory. Some attention is given to the use of the phrase ‘mixed metaphor’ in different genres, the relevance of grammatical boundaries to perception of ‘mixing’ between metaphors, and the possible pragmatic motivation for using ‘mixed metaphor’ as a metalinguistic label. The study broadly confirms the prevailing view that the notion of ‘mixed metaphor’ often involves a negative evaluation of a particular stretch of language and of the speaker/writer who produced it. However, in a substantial minority of cases, the phrase is used humorously to point out what are in fact creative, witty and highly effective uses of metaphor.

Item Type:
Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/core/keywords/englishlanguageandlinguistics
Subjects:
?? english language and linguisticsp philology. linguistics ??
ID Code:
69490
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
23 May 2014 15:57
Refereed?:
No
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
08 Nov 2023 00:08