The Metaphor Map of English, together with the Metaphor Map of Old English,
comprises a two-part compendium of metaphorical links in language and thought
throughout the history of English, the only one of the world's languages for
which such a compendium is available. Together, the Metaphor Maps form the main
output of a 3-year project funded by the AHRC, which used the electronic
database underlying the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
in order to undertake a comprehensive investigation of metaphor in the English
language for over a millennium. Both the methodology and the presentation of
the research are highly innovative. The data-driven approach involved
electronic analysis of the data to identify all occurrences of identical word
forms in different semantic categories, followed by manual analysis of the word
forms in each pair of categories (165,000 pairs in total) in order to
differentiate metaphor from other linguistic phenomena such as polysemy that is
not created by metaphor and homonymy. In total, over 4 million word senses and
accompanying pieces of data such as usage dates were analysed manually, and in
order to ensure that the research was fully rigorous, all analysis was carried
out twice, from both sides of each category pair, and then further checked
twice by members of the project team working independently. The presentation of the research is equally original, since the Metaphor Maps are fully
interactive, allowing users to search and access the research findings in a
range of different ways, as well as linking directly to the Historical
Thesaurus. The significance of the output lies not only in the identification
of over 14,000 metaphorical connections between semantic categories, together
with tens of thousands of individual words instantiating these connections, but
also in the transformation of the research field from selective and often
subjective studies to a fully comprehensive and empirical approach.