Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

Over the past 30 years, it has become clear that metaphor is not simply a literary phenomenon; metaphorical thinking underlies the way we make sense of the world conceptually. When we talk about 'a healthy economy' or 'a clear argument' we are using expressions that imply the mapping of one domain of experience (e.g. medicine, sight) onto another (e.g. finance, perception). When we describe an argument in terms of warfare or destruction ('he demolished my case'), we may be saying something about the society we live in. The study of metaphor is therefore of vital interest to scholars in many fields, including linguists and psychologists, as well as to scholars of literature.

Key questions about metaphor remain to be answered; for example, how did metaphors arise? Which domains of experience are most prominent in metaphorical expressions? How have the metaphors available in English developed over the centuries in response to social changes? With the completion of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), we can begin to address these questions comprehensively and in detail for the first time. That is what this project plans to do.

Almost half a century in the making, HTOED is the first reference book in the world to offer a comprehensive semantic classification of the words forming the written record of a language. In the case of English, this record covers thirteen centuries of change and development, in metaphor as in other areas. We will use the HTOED evidence base to investigate how the language of one domain of experience (e.g. medicine) contributes to others (e.g. finance). As we proceed, we will be able to see innovations in metaphorical thinking at particular periods or in particular areas of experience, such as the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the early days of psychoanalysis. The organisation of HTOED into three general sections, the External World, the Mental World and the Social World, each containing detailed subcategories, lends itself to this kind of research.

To achieve our goal, we will devise tools for the analysis of metaphor historically, starting by designing a database that will allow us to identify instances where words extend their meanings from one domain into another. The database will generate an annotated 'Metaphor Map' which will allow us to demonstrate when and how significant shifts in meaning took place. Online displays will take the form of lists of uses accompanied by visualisations such as graphs. On the basis of this evidence, the team will produce a book examining key domains of metaphorical meaning, together with a Historical Thesaurus of English Metaphor. As the project develops, and after its completion, the Metaphor Map will be made freely available on the project website to researchers, teachers and the general public, with materials giving guidance on its use. Users will be able to contact the project team and to read about developments in an online blog.

The metaphors available to and articulated by a community are an index of its ways of thinking over time. Thanks to the HTOED and the Mapping Metaphor project, we now have the opportunity to track how metaphorical ways of thinking have changed over more than a millennium. The project outcomes will therefore be of interest not only to writers and academics in many fields, but to everyone with an interest in meaning, thought and language. It will also provide a useful resource for teaching in subjects such as semantics and historical linguistics, including making data available for undergraduate and postgraduate research projects.

General impact
HTOED achieved major impact on publication in 2009, underlining its appeal to a general readership. This 3900-page, two-volume publication is now in its fourth printing, taking the total number of copies sold to over 6000. In the six months around publication, Christian Kay participated in numerous radio and TV interviews and blogs, publicising HTOED to a large international audience. It won the 2009 Saltire Research Book of the Year Award. We will build on this success, anticipating that the proposed metaphor project will also achieve a broad impact, resulting in invitations to talk to general as well as academic audiences.

Through the proposed website, the project will engage in interactions beyond academia on national and international levels. We know from team members' experience of creating the AHRC-funded Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech that there is considerable scope for online linguistic resources to have an impact on the general public when these resources are well-publicised, free of charge, supported by guidance for users, and invite feedback and comments from users. We therefore expect a general audience to be interested in the Metaphor Map resource, and will investigate which aspects of new media produce the best response. Features on our website will include regular blogs on new discoveries and short entries such as 'metaphor of the week', to which the public will be invited to contribute.

Scholarly impact
Scholarly impact will also be achieved through the website, where researchers at all levels and in many disciplines will find freely available materials. We will use established academic events to publicise the project, such as the one-day conference being organised by the Philological Society in 2011 at the University of Glasgow to celebrate the publication of HTOED. We will also offer a link to the project to Oxford University Press for its new website, which combines the OED and HTOED in a single searchable resource, and invite links from other relevant projects.

Writers
A good deal of interest in HTOED came from professional writers, especially historical novelists aspiring to write authentic dialogue and other literary writers fascinated by the varied, and sometimes eccentric, reaches of the English language. Many of these tweeted and blogged enthusiastically when HTOED was published; we expect a similar level of interest in the Metaphor Map. We will develop a list of organisations through which we can contact and engage with writers, such as the Poetry Library in Edinburgh. We will also invite individual writers to contribute blogs in appropriate areas.

Education
While we will not develop teaching packages in the lifetime of the project, our online manual will include suggestions for its use in University teaching. Towards the end of the project, we will meet with teachers of English (already known to us through Continuing Professional Development work) and colleagues in Education to discuss how the project might be used in schools. The report on these discussions will form the basis for an application for subsequent funding to develop teaching materials, aimed at students of English language and literature.