A Comparative Corpus-based Approach to Investigating the Metaphor 'Language Death'
- Fiona Edwards, University of Sussex
- Old College Lorimer Room, University of Edinburgh
The phrase ‘language death’ is used by both linguists and in the media to describe a language
falling into disuse or disappearing. This paper explores the use of the metaphor ‘language death’
through the conceptual metaphor LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ORGANISM. Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) suggest that our conceptual systems affect our perception of reality and how we act upon
these perceptions. Surprisingly, very little research has been done on the effect of using this
metaphor to describe this phenomenon, which is of both social and political interest. This paper
presents a metadiscursive examination of the use of LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ORGANISM in a
corpus of academic texts and another of newspaper articles that discuss ‘language death’. This
research builds on previous work such as Crystal (2000), who supports the use of the metaphor,
whereas de Swaan (2004) criticises ‘language death’ as a misleading metaphor.
Taking lead from López and Llopis (2010), metaphorical pattern analysis (hereafter MPA) was
employed in order to analyse the data. MPA was applied by searching for the term language and
then looked for the metaphors in those sentences. This revealed the conceptual metaphors such
as LANGUAGE IS AN OBJECT (language loss) and LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ORGANISM
(language death). The use of a corpus-based methodology and MPA has been illustrated by
Stefanowitsch (2006) as highly effective and a more extensive and accurate model than
introspection, which has been traditionally used when identifying conceptual metaphors.
Stefanowitsch argues that MPA is especially beneficial when the aim of the investigation is to
uncover subtle differences within a given general concept. Thus, using it in this study should
effectively reveal subtle differences in the source domain selected for mapping onto the target
domain LANGUAGE for language in the comparison of linguistic texts and newspaper articles. This
paper not only seeks to draw attention to the effect of using these conceptual metaphors when
discussing languages in danger, but also compares the treatment of ‘language death’ in the news
and linguistic texts and discusses how linguistic ideas are communicated to the public.
falling into disuse or disappearing. This paper explores the use of the metaphor ‘language death’
through the conceptual metaphor LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ORGANISM. Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) suggest that our conceptual systems affect our perception of reality and how we act upon
these perceptions. Surprisingly, very little research has been done on the effect of using this
metaphor to describe this phenomenon, which is of both social and political interest. This paper
presents a metadiscursive examination of the use of LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ORGANISM in a
corpus of academic texts and another of newspaper articles that discuss ‘language death’. This
research builds on previous work such as Crystal (2000), who supports the use of the metaphor,
whereas de Swaan (2004) criticises ‘language death’ as a misleading metaphor.
Taking lead from López and Llopis (2010), metaphorical pattern analysis (hereafter MPA) was
employed in order to analyse the data. MPA was applied by searching for the term language and
then looked for the metaphors in those sentences. This revealed the conceptual metaphors such
as LANGUAGE IS AN OBJECT (language loss) and LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ORGANISM
(language death). The use of a corpus-based methodology and MPA has been illustrated by
Stefanowitsch (2006) as highly effective and a more extensive and accurate model than
introspection, which has been traditionally used when identifying conceptual metaphors.
Stefanowitsch argues that MPA is especially beneficial when the aim of the investigation is to
uncover subtle differences within a given general concept. Thus, using it in this study should
effectively reveal subtle differences in the source domain selected for mapping onto the target
domain LANGUAGE for language in the comparison of linguistic texts and newspaper articles. This
paper not only seeks to draw attention to the effect of using these conceptual metaphors when
discussing languages in danger, but also compares the treatment of ‘language death’ in the news
and linguistic texts and discusses how linguistic ideas are communicated to the public.