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Metaphorical complexes and (evaluative) communities This talk focusses on metaphorical complexes (MCs) in online discourse, considering evaluation and dialogicity in particular (Du Bois 2007, 2014). We define MCs as dialogic strings of metaphors that start with a metaphorical trigger and continue with direct or indirect replies that reuse or recontextualize the trigger, providing—in an evaluative context—a similar or different metaphorical evaluation. MCs evolve around a single source concept (e.g., ANIMALS) applied to a target (e.g., politicians). Applying the MIV procedure (Cameron and Maslen 2010), we identified MCs in several Croatian datasets: forum discussions and chats with no specific topic ; discussion threads with clearly defined topics ; and news stories and opinion articles followed by website or Facebook comments, which may differ in degree of anonymity and interactivity. Some of these datasets are complex and include two genres (e.g., a news story and online comments following it) with their distinct features. Metaphorical complexes in our data range from rather short ones consisting of a few components to long ones with more than twenty components. We examine factors that encourage the appearance of MCs and influence their length, especially focusing on the functions of MCs in discourse. In our data, MCs develop within a single genre (e.g., Facebook comments on a news story) or across genres in a single discourse sample (e.g., a metaphorical complex starts in a news story and continues in the comments on the story), or across discourse samples if these samples share the same macro-topic in a specific timeframe. We found that MCs may appear in any dialogic situation, but they tend to be rich in components in online comments when their triggers are introduced by influential discourse participants (politicians or journalists) in preceding news stories. We also found that the structure and complexity of metaphorical complexes relates to the genre, general purpose of interaction, and identity and (relative) power of the discourse participants. MCs in their entirety or their single components may be evaluative (see, e.g., Deignan 2010) ; in these cases, providing new components by different discussants implies their joining an evaluative community, or questioning established evaluative frames. We briefly address the relation of MCs to other similar phenomena: multiple occurrences of individual (evaluative) metaphors that, when occurring in a single text, resemble metaphorical complexes, and metaphorical chains. Cameron, Lynne, and Robert Maslen. 2010. ‘Identifying Metaphors in Discourse Data’. In Metaphor Analysis: Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities, edited by Lynne Cameron and Robert Maslen, 97–115. London, Oakville: Equinox. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10871871. Deignan, Alice. 2010. ‘The Evaluative Properties of Metaphor’. In Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World, edited by Graham Low, Zazie Todd, Alice Deignan, and Lynne Cameron, 357–73. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Deignan, Alice, Jeannette Littlemore, and Elena Semino. 2013. Figurative Language, Genre and Register. Cambridge University Press. Du Bois, John W. 2007. ‘The Stance Triangle’. In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, edited by Robert Englebretson, 164:139–82. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———. 2014. ‘Towards a Dialogic Syntax’. Cognitive Linguistics 25 (3): 359–410. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2014-0024. |
