THE use of metaphors in the English language goes back more than one thousand years, researchers in Glasgow have found.
People have been using metaphorical allusions to outline events and spruce up descriptions since at least the 7th century, according to a 'metaphor map, devised by a team at the University's School of Critical Studies.
The team have completed a three-year-long project to trace metaphor over the entire history of the English language, creating the map resource containing thousands of metaphorical connections.
The Metaphor Map is still a work in progress, but once complete will also include tens of thousands of examples of words with metaphorical senses, while around a quarter of these have been put online so far.
The Metaphor Map is based on the data contained in the Historical Thesaurus of English, which took from 1966-2009 to compile, and the Oxford English Dictionary.
The researchers, who have been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), have been able to identify more than 10,000 metaphorical connections between different categories and track how language use has changed over the centuries.
Dr Wendy Anderson, Principal Investigator on the "Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus" project, said:
"These findings support the view that metaphor is pervasive in language and a major mechanism of meaning-change.
"This helps us to see how our language shapes our understanding - the connections we make between different areas of meaning in English show, to some extent, how we mentally structure our world," she added.
"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.
"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."
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