#metaphor map

Have you ever wondered when we started to refer to cleverness as if it were light (using terms such as ‘brilliant’ and ‘bright’ as opposed to ‘dim’)? Have ideas always been discussed as if they were children (with imaginations being ‘fertile’, being able to ‘birth’, ‘father’, and ‘conceive’ of ideas)? A research project on metaphor mapping taking place at the University of Glasgow is looking to uncover these very evolutions of thought. We spoke with Dr Ellen Bramwell about the project and its implications for how we understand metaphor.

For the past three years the team in Glasgow has been working on the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project, culminating in the launch of the freely-accessible Metaphor Map of English. The Metaphor Map shows metaphorical links between different areas of meaning from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. The tool lets us explore how metaphorical ways of thinking and expressing ourselves have changed over more than a millennium, and will provide a key to answering questions such as how do metaphors arise, which domains of experience are most prominent in metaphorical expressions, and how have metaphors developed over the centuries in response to social change.

Launched in July 2015 to a positive reception, the Map has proved to have a broader appeal than the team ever imagined, explained Ellen: “The Metaphor Map was originally envisioned as a tool for researchers in the history of English and for those interested in how language changes and how people mentally structure their world. However, we have had a real explosion of interest amongst the wider public since we launched the Map – it seems that these are issues which strike a chord beyond universities.”

The sheer scale of the project is staggering. This is the first time that an entire language has been analysed in this way, simply because an equivalent to the Historical Thesaurus of English, on which the research is based, doesn’t exist for any other language. “We have ended up with around 14,000 metaphorical connections between categories and many, many more thousands of words giving evidence for these connections.”  The research means that we can see which connections are long-standing and those which are relatively new. “We can trace metaphorical connections back through time to when their first written evidence emerged. Many metaphors go right back to the Old English spoken by the Anglo-Saxons before 1150AD, for example describing being emotionless in terms of solidity (as in the word ‘hard’) or mental understanding in terms of vision (as in to ‘see’).”

Metaphors are being invented all the time by writers to express ideas in a novel way, yet they also frequently emerge and become everyday expressions in popular culture. For example the use of the word ‘virus’ when applied to the domain of computers helps people understand something new in terms of something they already understand. “There are tens of thousands of metaphorical expression in English, at the very least. Researchers have argued that somewhere between 8% and 18%* of English communication is metaphorical,” said Ellen, “so it’s very widespread.”

Ellen reports that concepts from the physical world are particularly common in metaphors, especially when used to describe something abstract and intangible. We make sense of the world with metaphors, whether we’re talking about ‘a healthy economy’ or ‘a clear argument’, and often, without realising, we may be saying something about the society we live in. “The really interesting thing is that different languages do not necessarily use the same metaphorical connections, which suggests that those speakers might possibly be thinking about the same concepts in a different way,” said Ellen.

The team’s AHRC-funded educational project, Metaphor in the Curriculum, is currently working with secondary school teachers to produce a range of free online educational resources based around the Metaphor Map, available in spring next year, along with an app which uses the Metaphor Map. The hope is that the Map will help students understand metaphor on a deeper level. “One thing we found while talking to school teachers was that some pupils really struggle with understanding and identifying metaphor in literature, let alone in more ‘everyday’ texts such as newspapers. I think it is important to learn about metaphor if you want to understand language, especially in terms of how it might relate to thought and to how words change their meaning,” said Ellen.

Online tools such as the Metaphor Map and Yossarian provide ways for students to engage with metaphors and open themselves up to more creative modes of expression. When a user searches on Yossarian, they are encouraged to think about the metaphorical connections between their search term and their image results. Our users have reported that practicing this kind of lateral thinking helps to improve their creativity. Ellen agrees that thinking metaphorically is an inherently creative process: “Regardless of the connection you are making, it involves mentally bringing together two entirely separate concepts. Mapping the attributes of one thing onto another requires a leap of imagination, especially if you are making a connection for the first time. What we have done in creating the Metaphor Map is to provide an immense picture of these leaps of imagination throughout the history of the English language.”

Head over to the Metaphor Map to start exploring for yourself, and be sure to take a look at the user guides and the short video guides which provide a great introduction to the tool. Many thanks to Dr Ellen Bramwell, for taking the time to explain the research and answer our questions.