Metaphor in the Korean Language: A study using Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU)

Document Type : Academic research papers

Authors

1 Department of Korean Language, Faculty of Al-Alsun (Faculty of Languages), Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt.

2 Honorary Professor of Korean Linguistics College Of Cultural and Social Sciences Woosuk University – South Korea

3 Full Professor of Arabic Linguistics Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages) Ain Shams University - Egypt

Abstract

Metaphor is commonly associated with literature and rhetoric; however, it is in fact a part of everyday language use (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Cognitive Linguistics views metaphor in language as a systematic underpinning of thought and essential to our understanding of the world. Metaphor is often used because it compares abstract and hard-to-comprehend ideas to concrete and easier-to-comprehend ones. An extensive usage of metaphors can be seen since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic. In this study, linguistic metaphors for COVID-19 in the Korean language are examined. Contrary to traditional research, a bottom-up approach for linguistic metaphors is used; instead of the widely used Lakoff & Johnson (1980)’s top-down approach for conceptual metaphors. Accordingly, the aim of the paper is to apply Steen et al. (2010b)’s metaphor identification procedure of Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) on Korean and discuss its pros and cons. First, MIPVU and the reasons for choosing it to identify and analyse metaphors are presented. Second, it is applied on each lexical item in a newspaper discourse; where the number of sentences and lexical items studied are 27 and 490, respectively. Third, linguistic issues and operationalisation issues while applying MIPVU are discussed. They are mainly a result of Korean’s agglutinative characteristics and the difference in the lexicographic resources available. Although, the paper points out these issues, it provides suggestions for a more effective application of MIPVU in Korean. Nevertheless, MIPVU has proved to be a reliable procedure of metaphor identification in Korean that eliminates researcher biases yielding authenticity.

Keywords

Buhūth
Volume 2, Issue 9 - Serial Number 9
Social Sciences & Humanities
September 2022
Pages 20-46

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics