Mappings and narrative in figurative communication

Showing how metaphors are used to talk about entities, relations and attributes in one domain by drawing on another, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has sometimes been used in language analysis to highlight and explore fixed correspondences between domains. Another perspective is given by Schön (1979) who suggested that metaphors can draw a relationship between the topic and a common sequence of events—i.e. that metaphors can impose a narrative sequence on their topic, and by Musolff (2006, 2007), who described “scenarios,” metaphors based on fragments of experience, incorporating a culturally shared evaluation. In two case studies, these complex relationships are further explored: The first examines three artifacts apparently realizing life is a journey, initially in terms of correspondences between domains. The second provides a detailed analysis of two speeches about education, analyzing them both in terms of metaphorical mappings and correspondences, and as narratives. The exploration of narratives is informed by a reference corpus, which is used to provide data from the language at large about the behavior of words and phrases from the education speeches.