Péter Csatár:
Data collection in metaphor research: old problems and new approaches
Abstract:
The questions of how the relevance of data may be determined, how data can be treated and what role they play in linguistic theories, which form the focus of many methodological discussions nowadays, can be put for cognitive linguistic metaphor research as well. In my paper I focus on the data collection procedure, the introspective-intuitive method of the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson. My study examines the critical points of this procedure, and what alternatives have been suggested for the introspective-intuitive collection of data. I am going to argue in my analysis of the alternative procedures of data collection in metaphor research (Steen’s propositional analysis, corpus linguistic approaches) that the criticism is justified but the problems of the classical data collection technique cognitive metaphor theory has made use of cannot be solved completely by its alternatives either, since these are also dependent on introspection and intuition.
