Metaphor

The purpose of this assignment is to lead you to think about metaphors and the relation between source domains and target domains. You will explore a natural phenomenon as a source domain and its relation to various target domains that it structures via a metaphorical mapping. Choose a natural phenomenon (for example, earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, thunder, rain, etc.). Explore how that concept/lexical item and the frames in which it appears is applied to the understanding of other domains. Choose any two target domains and provide “conceptual maps” of correspondences of characteristics of the source domain and the target domain. Comment on the role of the grammatical context in which the lexical items are interpreted metaphorically. You may use corpora to find natural phenomena metaphors.